Perdition Rewritten
by AristideCauquemaire
Summary: [Hades Hangmen MC fanfic] The life of Viking, Secretary of the Austin chapter of the Hades Hangmen Motorcycle Club, is all about the four B's - bikes, brawls, beers, and women. When a discovery at a neo-Nazi base turns into something more, he is forced to sort out his priorities, face his own past, and fight for a future he wants. hetromance, angst, drama, mature themes, language
1. Prologue

**Preamble:  
** _Hello, reader! 'Tis me, after almost five years of silence. Life has not been kind to my muse. Sigh.  
_  
 _The following fanfiction belongs in Tillie Cole's "Hades Hangmen MC" universe which I adore to an unhealthy degree._

 **WARNING: **If you **haven't read** any of those books, do **not start** with this story. Seriously, you won't understand what's going on unless you have read at least books 1 to 5 of that series! I ain't kiddin'!

 _Also: If you read the Hades Hangmen series, you know the type of **language and themes** that will be happening in this story. Both are **mature**. (So mature, in fact, that I believe I will get my ff dot net account suspended for this... cough.)  
If you aren't old enough or are easily triggered by **descriptions of violence and sex or by liberal, creative use of the f-word, the b-word and/or the c-word** , please don't read this story. I mean it._

 _If you're still here: Hi! I'm Aristide. This fanfic has roughly 110.000 words and is divided into 25 chapters (including pro- end epilogue). The story itself is a teeeensy bit AU - I changed one key scene from book 4 (Rider/Bella's story "Deep Redemption"), as you will see in the prologue. Apart from that, the story will explain itself. Please enjoy and leave a review if you want to make me cry ugly, happy tears. Thank you!_

 _ **Prologue**_ _ **  
**_ _ **  
**_"The joker is a mighty card," the father explained as he went through the deck of cards, laid them out on the floor in front of him for his small but attentive audience to see and put them in some sort of order. "For quite some time, a man - or a woman," he nodded toward the daughter who was sitting cross-legged to his left, "who could tell jokes and make people laugh was the most powerful person in the whole world. Why do you think that was?"  
"Be-because..." The boy who sat to his right started even before he had a proper answer, just to get a head-start on his sister.  
"Because the joker was invited by everyone," his sister nearly yelled to drown the younger boy's voice out. She looked smugly at him, then her face turned hopeful as she looked at her dad. "Right, daddy?" she asked. "Like, he would go to all the dances and meet all the people and hear all the secrets."  
"Half-true. Not bad," the father conceded. His hands swished around as he shuffled the deck.  
The boy frowned. What did dances and knowing secrets have to do with power? It didn't make any sense to him. But he kept his mouth shut. His sister would destroy his toys again if he made her angry, and she always got angry when he contradicted her.  
"Who was the most powerful person in the kingdom?" the father asked.  
"The queen!" the girl shouted, sure of herself.  
"The king," the boy said decisively, still a little annoyed with his sister and how she was always right. "It's called a 'kingdom', not 'queendom'"," he insisted and earned a cold, _cold_ stare from his right that made him shiver with a sense of foreboding.  
"The king indeed," the father agreed and quickly continued before the stare could evolve into a hard slap against tender ears. "But where did he get his power?"  
"From his army," the boy replied. This was something he understood. "His soldiers and their horses and weapons."  
The girl scoffed.  
"True," the father said. "But who paid for that? For the soldiers and weapons and horses? When there's no war on at the moment, and the kingdom can't just take another kingdom's gold and money...?"  
"The... The king paid for it...?" The girl's answer sounded like a question.  
"Yes and no," the father answered. "The king gives the money away, but it's not really his. He was just a normal man, really. He is not magic. He didn't produce anything so he didn't get money for goods or services. Of course, it would look like the money in the kingdom's cellars was his, but someone else put it there."  
"The joker?" the boy asked, thinking about how jokers sometimes did magic. Maybe he had plucked a lot of gold coins from behind people's ears?  
The girl laughed shrilly. "The joker! That's stupid! If he had so much money, he would not run around in ugly patchwork clothes and made people laugh at him!" She laughed some more.  
The boy bit his lip. He didn't think patchwork clothes were so bad. Especially not in comparison with silk pantyhose and frilly skirts, like the king was wearing. And being laughed at – that was a sort of payment for him. It meant that he was good at his job! But his sister would never understand. She was always the one doing the laughing, never the one to receive it.  
"It is not wrong, actually." The father's words killed the girl's laughter and had the boy sitting up straighter. "The joker did put a little money in the vaults. Who else?"  
"The... The soldiers?" the boy asked carefully, thinking about a story where the soldiers had gone to some evil farmer's house and taken all of his hidden gold.  
"Yes. Who else?" The father looked to the girl.  
"The courtesans," the girl said, smirking at the boy because she knew he didn't know what that word meant.  
The father didn't linger. "Who else?"  
"The generals."They had been at the farmer's house, too. The father nodded.  
"The ladies-in-waiting." Another nod.  
The boy didn't know what those ladies would have been waiting for, and he didn't care. They were ladies, so whatever it was, it was probably boring.  
"The smiths." They made and sold swords, so they would have had a lot of money because everybody needed a sword. Another nod.  
"The servants!" The girl was screaming now to one-up the boy.  
"The- everyone!" The boy shouted as the correct answer came to him. It made sense. "Everyone!"  
"Aha! Exactly!" The father smiled broadly. The skin around his eyes crinkled and his bushy beard moved. "Everyone would give a little of their money to the king."  
"And the joker- the joker tells jokes to _everyone_ ," the boy recalled. He saw that the overlap but didn't get why that meant that the joker was suddenly more powerful than the king.  
"Yes, he did. And maybe, if he told a very clever joke, about...the king and what he does with all that money... for example, if he builds a new castle only for himself..."  
"Everyone will be angry at the king!" The boy understood now. "And they will not give the king any more money!"  
"But everyone _knows_ that kings build castles!" The sister shrilled. She didn't get it and it irritated her. The boy suppressed a grin. "Why would they need a stupid joker to tell a joke about it before they stop giving the king their money? Someone would have complained!"  
"Ah, but not for long, I'm afraid," the father smiled indulgently. "You see, the king really wants that nice new castle. And he has a lot of soldiers and assassins-"  
"So he can just kill the complainers!" The boy laughed. Oh, what he wouldn't give to be King in a long ago country. It made so much sense!  
"Or lock them and their families up. Take their money and lands. Destroy their reputation and make them into an enemy of the people. Anything." The father seemed a little sad about that, then perked up and his hands gathered speed while they shuffled and shuffled. "But if you're a joker, you don't _have_ family, or a lot of money, or lands, or reputation. You have stories and jokes and you're the life of every party! You know everyone and everyone knows you-"  
"The joker is protected!" The boy sat in wonder. The jokes, the stories, the stupid-looking clothes… they were his super power that made him practically invincible. "The king can't kill the joker."  
"Not without admitting the truth about the joke, anyway," the father added.  
"And making all the joker's fans really angry," the girl said, finally catching on but not happy about it. "And soon, everyone complains about the king and his castle and the lack of jokes at their parties, but he can't kill them all."  
"And that's why the joker is more powerful than the king. Than _all_ the kings. If the king decides to kill him, the king will fall. Right along with him. Every. Single. Time." The father laid out the playing cards before him, one for each sentence and word: The King of Spades, the King of Clubs, the King of Diamonds, the King of Hearts, and the Joker in the middle between them.  
The boy only ever played three rounds of this game with the father. It was late and he and his sister were both sent to bed.  
The next day, the father's living body came home from his work in the woods, but his mind was gone, and he never shuffled a deck and never told another story again.

"So it's bikes, brawls, booze and bitches?"  
Ulfr took a sip from his bottle even though it made his busted lip sting like a motherfucker, trying to look unimpressed and unconcerned. Under the table his right leg was bouncing like crazy, though.  
"Pretty much sums it up, son," Shade confirmed. When his lip curled up into a grin, his nicotine-yellow teeth gleamed alongside an artificial incisor crowned with gold. That smile made the 'don't fucking call me 'son'' die in Ulfr's throat.  
"Big boy like you, you'll be passing through the prospect stage in a blink. You'll bulk up, learn your way around a fuckin' bike, get to know some people, do some shit for the club… someone's bound to sponsor you in a heartbeat. Other brothers will wanna patch you in properly in no time."  
The muscle on the right, who hadn't introduced himself by name but was referred to as 'my sergeant' by Shade, wheezed a smoker's laugh. "All in a hurry to have a tank-sized murder puppy like you to cover their asses during a club run."  
Ulfr didn't even try to hide his grin at the label. True on all counts, after all. He was pushing six foot two, almost one-hundred ninety pounds already, and he was barely seventeen years old. With proper food for a change and some exercise, he didn't doubt that he would be a fucking unit in no time.  
And the murder was a double-check as well. They didn't _know_ , not with any certainty because he sure as shit hadn't told them. But Ulfr could tell that they knew in their guts. Birds of a feather. Takes one to know one. It's in the eyes. All that crap.  
And the 'puppy'...well, nothing wrong with a good laugh at the expense of a too-eager teenager.  
"And you're a proper club, right? Outlaw, one percent?" He paused. "Brothers only?"  
"'course," Shade scoffed. "Doesn't make sense to half-ass that shit. Hangmen deal with whatever the fuck they want, they do whatever the fuck they want, and they fuck whatever the fuck they want. Live free, ride free, die free. Pussy don't interfere with Hangmen business. Common law and whiny cunts ain't part of this operation, if you get what I mean."  
"I think I do." Ulfr smiled into his beer, pleased about this entire coincidence. He hadn't meant to come to this bar, or to get into a fight, or to win that fight, or to be invited for a beer by some guy in a cut who had eyes like the fucking antichrist himself, but here he was. "So. How do I get started, again?"  
"So eager. I like that." The gold tooth flashed once more. "Nothing complicated. For tonight, we just drink up, wind down and enjoy the view for a bit." He nodded toward the bartender. Long legs, short skirt, lots of boob, not a lot of bra. Perfect combination.  
"Eventually, we'll introduce you to the brothers properly, and then you'll just do exactly the same thing you've always done."  
Ulfr really didn't care too much who he fucked up with his fists, or his gun, or his knife, or his bat, or any other type of blunt, pointy, stabby or shooty object, so it was all the same to him. He nodded slowly. "Sounds like this whole thing is right in my fuckin' wheelhouse."  
Sergeant chuckled again and muttered, "Doghouse." Then, he tipped the lip of his own beer bottle at him in greeting, officially welcoming him to his new home – the Hades Hangmen Motorcycle Club, Austin, Texas, USA.

It was chaos. Chaos in hell.  
Dead lay next to dying people. Children, women, men who had never so much as harmed a fly throughout their lives were indistinguishable from the killers, the rapists, the power-hungry sadists and fanatics.  
The Hangmen rained down upon them all like aircraft bombs and mowed them down, good and bad alike.  
The air was saturated with noise. A siren wailed from speakers, people screamed like animals, bloodthirsty dogs yowled like people, gunfire rent the air, men yelled, women screeched.  
One female scream cut off as Ky, vice president of the Hades Hangmen, caught a woman – a girl, really – by the throat with one hand and closed his fingers around it.  
He locked eyes with her to make sure she recognized him for what he was. Then, he lifted her up to watch her die. His blood-stained teeth gleamed as he grinned.  
Mae and Maddie, and uncounted girls and women just like them had suffered or were still suffering – and this girl had helped the torturers, killed innocent bystanders, prolonged the misery, and gotten into the MC's way.  
More than anything, though, she had caused harm to Lilah. _His_ Lilah. For that, she deserved to die, and he deserved to make sure she did.  
Sarai, Prophet Judah's beloved fourteen year old head consort, fought to the end. Even as her vision exploded in black and red splotches, her lungs balled into angry fists for want of air and her head felt ready to burst open lengthwise, her fingernails scratched red lines into the skin of the arm that was propping her up, as far as she could reach. Her legs flailed, her feet sometimes catching the devil's man in the side of his torso.  
It was useless.  
Ky heard his name being called, followed by an angry bellow and a salvo of machine gun fire. He lowered the girl down onto her feet, twisting her around and pinning her back against his body so she wouldn't get away. Too dazed, she gasped and coughed and put up no resistance, didn't even try to run.  
His brothers of the MC. They needed him to do his fucking part.  
His Lilah's half-sister, Phebe, was still around somewhere. He needed to get her and the other handful of sane people out of here.  
There were still some cult assholes running around who had had their dicks in underaged pussies, and Ky needed them to fucking die screaming. Prophet Judah himself, who had Lilah raped, lashed and almost burnt at the stake, was one of them.  
This place, this cultist hellhole whose very soil was soaked with the tears and the blood dripping from young girls just like his Lilah, needed to be wiped off the face of the Earth.  
In comparison to all that, the brainwashed little bitch in his grip was really unimportant. Not even worth wasting a bullet on.  
So he pulled out his knife, gripped it tight and brought the metal butt down on her skull, hard enough to crack it like an egg. Blood spewed out of the wound. It had soaked and turned her dark blond hair red before her body, discarded by Ky, had even fully collapsed to the ground.  
Ky forgot all about her as he walked away.


	2. Chapter 1

_Whoa, you're still here! Sit down, have a cookie, and enjoy chapter 1! ****_

 _ **PART 1**_

 _ **Viking**_ **  
**  
"You."  
Slam.  
"Fucking."  
Slam.  
"Fucker."  
Slam.  
"Fucking."  
Crack.  
"Knocked."  
Crack.  
"My."  
 _Crunch-slop._  
A solid spray of blood hit me in the eyes. I wiped them with the back of my left wrist. Couldn't even see what I was hitting any more.  
Turned out, the aforementioned Nazi was pretty much unrecognizable as a human being already. Where his decidedly non-Aryan face had been was now a fist-size crater filled with bits of bones, teeth and cartilage that were swimming in blood.  
 _Huh. They don't make 'em like they used to._  
"Fucking tooth out," I finished my sentence, got up and added my own gob of blood into the puddle that used to be some white supremacist's face. The asshole had got in a lucky punch with his elbow when I went round a corner without checking first, knocking me on my ass and robbing me of my upper left eyetooth. Fuck me! With all the punches in the mouth I was regularly getting from my MC brothers for imparting my wisdom on them, it was a nasty surprise that some no-name neo-Nazi fucker would be the one to finally knock out one of my teeth.  
"Jesus, Vike. Did he try to fuck you in the ass without asking first?" AK, my assigned partner for this ambush, eyed the messy pile of human leftovers – and then me – with some distaste, then got back to scouting the area, ever the professional sniper. AK had no problem with gore. He just didn't approve of being messy, and I looked like Carrie White, post-prom.  
"Fucker ruined the greatest smile the Hangmen ever had. The club sluts are gonna cry so much y'all are gonna have to use my cock as a snorkel to stay alive during the flooding," I grumbled, sucking more blood out of the jagged hole my gums had recently acquired and spitting it out.  
"That makes zero fucking sense, man," AK remarked. I wasn't even gonna dignify that with a response.  
"Gonna have to ask Prez for a fucking dental plan." I felt around the fresh wound with the tip of my tongue and winced. Bits of the root were still stuck in there. Figured. Weak-assed Nazis couldn't even finish a job like _that_ properly. "Mighty looking forward to that conversation."  
AK snorted a laugh, then fell silent when a salvo of gunfire rang out nearby, followed by several answering salvos. "Sounds like Hush and Cowboy found the rest of the party."  
Salvos. Screams and yells, none of which sounded even remotely like a Hangman. Fewer salvos.  
I huffed. "Well, that'll keep those two lovebirds busy for a while." I picked organic bits of Nazi out of my heavy-duty brass knuckles, checked and re-checked my own guns and knives that had become dislodged during the scuffle and relieved the corpse of everything potentially useful, such as a ridiculous-looking and small but serviceable Luger handgun, ammo, and a heavy ring of keys that winked at me. "And afterwards they'll take each other's clothes off and oil each other up, and there'll be the Careless Whisper-saxophone solo and all that shit. What I'm saying is," I turned to AK, hefting my rifle, "I say we leave them to it and go in through the back. And by that I don't mean buttsex, but literally, going in through _the_ back. Of the camp. Cover me."  
AK shook his head at me and rolled his eyes with a snort – I counted that as a fucking victory – and followed anyway.  
We made our way across the gloomy, deserted camp, keeping to the building's shadows when possible and moving fast across open spaces that were dimly lit by low wattage floodlights. There wasn't anyone left for AK to cover me from, though. Nothing but dead bodies were out and about in Naziville, Bumfuck, Hudspeth County, Texas.  
Behind the northernmost shed, we ran into Samson and Smiler. Samson, a navy SEAL-looking hulk of a guy, was a newer brother, a defector from The Order, a long-gone doomsday cult based near Austin. Smiler, on the other hand, was a lifer and had practically already been patched in before his balls had dropped. He was pretty much the coldest-blooded motherfucker I had ever known, and thus the most fun to annoy.  
Just as we met up, the last burst of gunfire cut off, and then there was silence for a few long minutes.  
"Those were the last few," Smiler declared. "Seems like Texas is officially Nazi-free."  
"Man, is that a _smile_ I spy around your mouth?" I asked the brother, shoving his massive shoulder and getting in his face. I couldn't help it. It was my mission to make my brothers crack up every once in a while, and he and his frowny fucking mug always been a challenge. " _That_ what it takes? Killing the last Nazis? You should've told us, Smiles! We would've saved the last few for you personally. Kidnapped some, kept them alive in a storage shed, given them to you on your birthday and shit like that."  
Smiler looked at me, all resting murder-bitch-face. I grinned back at him. I knew I was close, _this_ close to cracking him.  
"Fuck is happening in your mouth, Vike?" Samson asked, laughing. After six years with us, he finally almost sounded like a proper brother when he talked.  
I turned to him, taking a step toward him while making sure to keep the grin in place so he could get a load of the nasty war wound I had earned. I felt blood seep into my beard. "Come closer, hon. I'll tell you the whole story."  
"Girls, when you're done with the catfighting, we split up and sweep the buildings. Tanner just messaged me, says Satellite pics say we got all the hostiles. No heat signatures left." AK put his phone into his breast pocket. "Remember, kids: Pillage first, then burn. And then we fucking go home."  
The four of us scattered, randomly choosing a building to loot and eventually set alight if it proved uninteresting and was made of flammable material.  
Some years ago, the Hades Hangmen MC had collectively resolved to purge the state of Texas of the plague that was Meister and his neo-Nazi operation. It had taken much longer than anyone had hoped for – fascists were fucking everywhere, including, apparently, the oval office. There were so many fucking layers to the Nazi onion – Old-skoolers, Neos, American Front, the KKK, the National Renaissance Party, couple of all-white church groups, massive parts of the fucking NRA… everyone and their gramps seemed to have a big ol' boner for the good ol' days when white men could fuck up non-white people and get a clap on the shoulder for it. Couple of years ago, Meister's neos in particular had even teamed up with the fucking Mexican cartels – another far-reaching organization that was completely unfamiliar with the concept of motherfucking irony – because they really, really wanted us meddling Hangmen dead and out of Texas.  
But right here, so close to the border of Mexico that the people in Chihuahua could probably smell our farts on the wind if they lifted their noses, the mission was finally accomplished. Only a few more buildings to blow up, a few bodies to burn, and every trace of the gang of bastards who had crossed the biggest, meanest MC in the entire US of A would be gone. History. Finito.  
 _Life is fucking good_ , I thought to myself as I entered one of the few concrete constructions in the encampment, a dilapidated-looking one-storey, flat-roofed bungalow-looking hovel that sat up north-west on what might graciously be called the 'main road'.  
Somewhere in the distance, I heard the back-up roll in, no doubt right through the front door and along that main road because who the fuck was left to stop us? The thunder of American-made motorcycles was unmistakable. A handful of brothers from the Roswell chapter would help with the dirty work. Bass and Hook, two former combat engineers and EODs, would bring in heavy duty C4 and create a beautiful new crater, right here.  
And then we would all go home and fucking party. There would be booze and boobs galore. Naturally, all my pussy-whipped brothers would take their old ladies and their kids to their cabins before the moon was even up, leaving all the good stuff and the cock-hungry bitches for me.  
Bikes, brawls, booze, and bitches. Shade had been a major prick during his reign but his advertising pitch had proved to be true on all counts.  
Buying what Shade had been selling? Best decision of my life.

/

I looked through the rooms of the house that turned out to be an actual residence, complete with living room, bathroom and kitchen, even though all of them were run-down and straight-up nasty, like something out of an early episode of Hoarders. I swore out loud when I opened another door, finding a storage closet that was inhabited by several decent-sized rats which promptly fled all over my boots.  
"Found myself the jackpot," I groused and threw the door shut to keep the reek of rodent scat in. Not that it made much of a difference. "Fucking Nazi scum, living in their own filth. Look at the ceiling crumbling down around your fucking ears. Jesus fucking H Christ. Y'all really let standards slide. Adolf would be so disappointed. What happened to shining your fucking combat boots until you can see yourself in them and keeping your fucking rooms tidy? Man, your ceiling mold is more evolved than your average foot soldier. No wonder a mere dozen biker assholes can come along and fuck you all up within a single night."  
Stomping out Nazis was always fun, sure, but it was also a bit like Whac-a-mole. Fuckers kept cropping up because some asshole or another kept financing them. I just wanted to know why _Texas_ , of all places. Was it the fucking landscape? The weather? Were Nazis secretly into authentic fajitas, or into spic bitches, like the Hangmen's resident ex-Nazi, Tanner? Or didn't they _come_ here at all, were they all _born_ here in the first place? Was every Nazi once a Confederate flag waving retard at heart?  
In any case, the weakening of the Texan Nazi bloodline had been duly noted during the last few years. Their strongholds got progressively more like _weak_ holds, their equipment less and less impressive, their numbers smaller and smaller overall and the individuals that constituted their ranks… well, none of them had been voted Most Likely to Find the Cure for Cancer in their high school yearbook, that was for fucking sure. Tanner's intel said that they were hoarding the last few considerable stocks of guns and dirty explosives in this particular encampment, but I'd be surprised if anyone up the Nazi food chain had trusted the limp dicks who lived here with anything more valuable than crates full of packing peanuts.  
I looked around some more, pointing my gun at rotting furniture and kicking closet doors open –and quickly shut again – with the tip of my boot. Man, this was a definite, pathetic low. Another indication that we had indeed reached the end of this particular road. Fucking _finally_. I was going to make sure that the upcoming party would be the mother of all parties.  
Finally, we could go back to fucking up Russians, Irish or Asians, like in the good old days. Honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned club runs, in and out, one and done, maybe half a day's ride away from the compound so that we could ride out by first light, fuck some assholes up in the afternoon, take their money and their guns, and be home and in some club slut's pussy in the evening. I was actually looking forward to that. I was sick to death of lying around three nights in a row scouting boring Nazi encampment movements through night vision binoculars while Texas dirt slowly accumulated in my ass crack.  
The last door to the left was padlocked shut. I considered shooting it open – close range, high powered gun, that would work, no problemo – but then I remember the keys I had taken off the asswipe who had ruined my pearly whites. Might was well give it a try.  
There were eight keys on the chain, but only two that might fit into a run-of-the-mill steel padlock. The second one actually fit and turned, much to my surprise. _Fuck me. Did I accidentally kill the fuckin' Führer?_ Pathetic as it was, this house was clearly some sort of personal living quarter for a more important asshole within the Nazi ranks. It stood to reason that the guy with the keys would be the guy who lived here. I made a mental note to look through the house more thoroughly again before it was blown up. Chances were an Ober-Nazi was hiding important or valuable shit in safes hidden behind framed pictures of Eva fucking Braun or some crap like that.  
God, I hated Nazis. Even and especially pathetic ones.  
I jiggled the padlock open and slid the door latch aside. Before I even stepped into the dark room, the smell hit me in the nose and registered immediately in the more primitive parts of my brain.  
Sex and death. That's what went through my head.  
Not just any sex. Bad sex, not the fun kind. The kind that drew blood and tears and made one participant sweat with anger, and the other piss themselves in defense and fear, and ended with one of them retching up bile because of what had happened.  
Not just any death. The creeping, slow, agonizing kind that came from sickness and infection, from bacteria in human excrement and from rot spreading through body parts.  
I yanked the collar of my T-shirt up and over my nose to stave off some of the stench, and my gun from my holster, just in case. My weaker left hand needed several long seconds to find the light switch on the wall and flip it.

/

I squinted against the light. There was a fucking authentic-looking chandelier dangling from the ceiling, brighter than a whole Christmas tree. The whole room looked like a hyper-stylized time capsule of upper class Germany in the 1930s, complete with shiny wine red-and-gold wallpaper and polished oak wood, a creepy ass Carl Spitzweg painting mounted above an obviously fake ass fireplace next to a fake ass window hung with gold-thread curtains, and a gramophone on a small table in the corner.  
And on the bed, there was a human being.  
I thought it was a corpse, not only because Tanner had confirmed no other heat signatures. It was a pasty-white bag of bones, lying face-down, arms and legs spread-eagled wide because all four extremities had been tied to the four bedposts with what looked like electrical cords. Someone had put a bag or a hood over their head, but not given them clothes to cover up. The bed, and the person on it, was clearly the source of the smell. The sheets were stained with all sorts of bodily fluids (and semi-solids), and so was the body itself.  
"God, I hate Nazis," I quietly reiterated, then yelled "FUCK!" and reflexively pointed my gun when, at my words, the corpse flinched.  
Not a corpse, then.  
Not yet, anyway.  
Several seconds ticked by before a reasonable thought filtered through the adrenaline spike.  
 _Not a corpse, Viking, but also clearly not a threat. Put your gun down, you moron. That's clearly a victim. Take your fucking KA-BAR and cut them loose. And how about calling AK or someone so they can get some fucking help?  
_ My inner voice confused me sometimes _._ Too many clever ideas at once, and also, it sounded an awful lot like AK – not that I would ever tell the real AK that – who talked about himself in third person. Very weird.  
"Found something interesting?" The real AK had answered his phone on the first ring.  
"Some _one_ , at the brick bungalow shithole," I replied. "Still alive, though you wouldn't know it by the stink."  
I looked to the person on the bed again. They had jerkily moved around some more, as much as the cables allowed, and now that the first surprise had subsided, I had time to process what I was fucking looking at.  
With all the blood and filth and dramatic shadows from the chandelier, there was no telling what was going on between their spread legs, genitalia-wise – and I really didn't want to look too closely anyway – but their general shape was delicate, there was a definite swell of a tit smooshed into the dirty sheet underneath, and the way their ass and hips were shaped was another giveaway.  
Apart from the grip and trigger of my favorite M24E6, the handlebars of my bike, and my own cock, a female ass was pretty much the most familiar shape in this world to me.  
"It's a woman." One with a potentially nice ass, too. If she survived.  
There was a silence, then AK replied from between clenched teeth, "Be right there", and hung up.  
I knew that AK was thinking about Phebe and Sapphira, because I was, too. The Meister-sponsored horror brothels for the Nazi goons that we had pulled them out of were not something any Hangman would ever forget as long as he lived. Talk about _real_ fucked up shit.  
But for AK, the memory had burnt in deep, into the core of his soul. Probably because both Phebe and Saff still had nightmares about it from time to time and there was nothing he could really do to help them.  
That was reason why, over the past six years, AK – reasonable, strategizing AK who came up with plans A to F for every tiny club run, but would rather stay home with his old lady and his adopted daughter – had been the most vocal about immediately hammering every last trace of Nazi into the ground. Someone caught a whiff of a White Power gathering somewhere in Texas? AK wanted to be there, with all the guns and all the backup, ready to nuke the place and everyone in it. Someone whispered about a new Meister on the rise? AK was the one standing by the aspirant's bed in the middle of the night, waking him up with a shower of gasoline and a lit cigarette. When it came to obliterating Meister's legacy and dissuading anyone from recreating his enterprise, AK had been like a rabid dog with a bone.  
I could only guess what seeing this girl in this state would do to the brother. Especially now that there was literally no one left in the entire state of Texas on whom he could wreak vengeance, on her behalf, and on Phebe's, and on Sapphira's. I didn't really want him to see her.  
And I wanted to get out of this shit museum, yesterday, before the smell of bloody diarrhea lodged in my nose permanently.  
So I holstered my gun, pulled out the knife and started cutting the cables that bound the half-dead girl's right wrist to the bed frame.  
"Stay still. Don't move," I told her, just in case she could hear or understand me at all. "I'm cutting these off, but you gotta stay still for me. Alright? I don't want to hurt you. I'll start with your right hand."  
The plastic-wrapped copper wires gave way easily enough. Once the cut was made, the loops around her wrist loosened and fell away.  
"That's one down, three to go. You're doing fine. Just these three left, and then we're fucking outta here."  
I worked my way clockwise around the bed, carefully breathing only through my mouth the whole time. Once her left wrist was free, she was finally untied. I needn't have bothered with the 'don't move' thing, because she was not even giving me so much as a wriggle. I watched her torso intently for a second to see if she was even still breathing. She was. Putting firm hands on her – adding some bloody hand prints to the filthy canvas of her skin, too – I rolled her onto her back and towards me. She didn't seem to register anything that was happening. Her limbs were limp like noodles, tangling in the sheets and with each other when she flopped onto her back.  
I tried not to look too closely at her, but I saw it anyway. I saw it all and I would remember it whether I wanted to or not.  
Look. When it came to bitches, I was all for using them well and fucking them hard, and vice versa. I didn't see much of a problem with a hard slap across the face or a good spanking with a belt when they got mouthy and needed their software rebooted real quick – when a good dicking didn't do the job, which it usually did. And good dickings, as well as slaps and spankings, left marks here and there. I had left marks on women before, I knew, very few of them permanent. What could I say? I was a big, strong guy who was frequently real fucking drunk – more often than not, so were the sluts I was fucking at the time I was fucking them. Several of my brothers, whom I frequently shared sluts with, were considerably rougher with them than me, and MC life in general wasn't exactly treating anyone with kid gloves. Not to mention that most sluts didn't come to an MC party to have sweet, tame vanilla sex with a bunch of pansy-assed sensitive types.  
I had seen plenty women who were worse for wear.  
But there were _lines._ They were crystal clear to every fucking person with half a brain and a beating heart. They just couldn't be crossed, ever.  
Unless, apparently, if you were a fucking Nazi, then you had the fucking audacity to trample all over those lines, over and over again, as if that was your fucking birthright and a bitch owed it to you.  
Goddamn it. This was part of the reason why I was fucking glad to go on proper old-school club runs again and fuck up some grown-ass men over half a kilo of coke and a nasty word. I had seen too much shit like this in the last couple of years. Too many Nazi brothels. Too many underage pussies strapped to beds, drugged to the gills, with a For Sale-sign saying '4000 bucks per fuck' dangling from the ceiling. Fucking Mexicans. Fucking slave traders. Fucking Nazis.  
 _I really, really fucking hate Nazis.  
_ I inhaled and exhaled deeply to tamp down the rage. This wasn't the time to let that shit show. I was about to have her look in my face, too, and I didn't want the first thing she saw to be a bloodthirsty grimace. My mug was bad enough in neutral, especially with all the blood around my mouth.  
"Alright. So far, so good, sugarbun. I'm going to take this thing off now." I gathered one seam of the burlap-like material in my fingers and pulled it off as carefully as possible so I wouldn't rip off her hair along with it, and to not frighten her with the sudden light.  
The face that appeared before me was as bad as the rest of her body, if not worse – which was probably why Mr Obernazi had put a bag on it in the first place. I barely bit back a rather vicious curse at the sight of it.  
As gently as possible, I wiped dirty, sweaty hair to the side. I fished some ash blond strands out of her blood-and-bile-caked mouth and untangled them from her crusty eyelashes to make her a little bit more comfortable and have a better look at her. See if there was anything left to salvage here, or if those twitches were merely death throes.  
Her eyes were rolling around in their sockets, bloodshot and empty of consciousness, her scabbed, lash-less eyelids fluttering shut at random and independently from one another, like one of those creepy, old-fashioned lifelike baby dolls that 'went to sleep' when you laid them down on their backs.  
There was a half-mended cut in the middle of a chicken egg-sized bruise on her right cheek that looked exactly like someone had repeatedly backhanded her while wearing one of those heavy signet rings on their finger. A hundred bucks said that I would find a ring just like that on the hand of one very dead Nazi lying outside.  
The worst bit was whatever the hell was happening with her nose. It looked like an oversized septum piercing that had started turn necrotic, but I couldn't be sure with all the swollen tissue and the blood crusted around it. Her upper lip and the skin between it and her nostrils was an angry, swollen, oozing bulge, her nose blown up as if repeatedly stung by a very pissed-off hornet.  
All that shit _still_ couldn't hide the fact that the bitch was a stunner. Just the proportions and shape of her face, the structure of her cheek bones and the bow of mouth gave it away. Get her back on her feet, clean her up, put some meat on her bones and she would end up looking nearly as stunning as the VP's old lady.  
Something about her face tickled my memory. I was not usually good with names, but I hardly ever forgot a face, and the longer I looked at it, the more certain I was that I had seen this face before. _But where? When?_  
Lilah. Bella. Maddie. Mae. This bitch – some connection clicked into place. I frowned down at her. They belonged together, somehow –  
I had seen her before, just several years younger, together with the other former cult bitches— wearing that same gray bag-dress and that ugly fucking hair thing that Lilah had worn for ages—She had lived with Lilah and Ky, who had never bought her act-  
"Motherfuck!"  
My memory rolled over and spat out a name from far, far back.  
 _Sarai_.

/ **TBC**


	3. Chapter 2

_Hello! Enjoy chapter 2!_

 **Viking**

In a flash, I remembered even though it was long ago and I hadn't seen her often back then. Pretty, in the underfed teen kind of way. Painfully timid, shy from being messed with so bad, and more than a little fucked in the head, like all the cult bitches. She had somehow turned up at the MC's compound out of nowhere, allegedly searching for safety from The Order. The others – Mae, Lilah, Maddie – had taken care of her, brought her into the fold even when Prez and VP were unconvinced.  
One day, the bitches had all visited that church in downtown Austin that Maddie used to go to while Flame was recuperating from being shot in the neck. The pastor got shot dead, and the chicks were carried off by some neo-Nazi goons paid by The Order. In the end, we had found them again, relatively unharmed because Rider – Prophet Cain, then – that let them go.  
Sarai had disappeared that day. She must have gone back to the commune with Cain. Some time after that, the Hangmen and a returned Rider had unleashed war upon his lunatic twin Judah and his fanatics – as much as that had been possible, with more than half of them already lying dead by their own hands – and razed New Zion until nothing and nobody was left.  
It couldn't have been difficult for a fourteen-year-old to slip through the cracks in the confusion, and then, somehow, some of Meister's merry band of Nazis must have snatched her up.  
That was, what, almost seven years ago? Looking down at her, her face, her whole body seemed to be a barely-living testament to every single one of those years.  
 _Doesn't change the fact that she is a fucking snake.  
_ Yeah, this wasn't going to be uncomplicated, I could already tell. Fan-fucking-tastic.  
"Let's get you out of here," I told her unresponsive form, because there was literally nothing else to say or do.  
Because the sheets and blankets were fucking revolting and there was not a single other helpful item in the room, I took off my cut and put it on her for the moment. With all the time that had passed, she had to be twenty or twenty-one years old, but her body was still that of a teenager. My cut, being a relatively small piece of clothing made of less material than your average jacket, was still enough to wrap her up and cover her from her chest to her thighs.  
Just as I scooped her into my arms, noting that she was as cold and clammy as a dead fish, AK appeared in the doorway.  
"I've got her," I told him, consciously omitting her name, pulling her closer to my chest to shield her face from his eyes a little even though it was unlikely he'd recognize her, beat up as she was. AK was thin-skinned when it came to anything New Zion-related, rightfully so. Now wasn't the time for any drama, though. "Lead the way."  
AK looked around the room one last time, then nodded, turned around and made a beeline for the front door.  
"She the only one?" AK was scanning the place.  
"Only one I found anyway," I answered. "But there's another key on the ring I got from the asshole who bashed my tooth in. He must've been their head honcho. This must've been his place. Maybe he's hiding more, somewhere. I haven't checked for a basement."  
AK nodded. "Give me those keys, I'll get a closer look at everything. You want Rider to have a look at her? Take her home?"  
Rider was running around somewhere in the encampment, part of the back-up group that had entered just after the last Nazi had croaked. Just my luck, really. He would have recognized the bitch right away. I doubted it would've been a happy reunion.  
"She's in too bad shape," I said, shaking my head. Having seen her body, including the oozing track marks in the crooks of her elbows, I knew that, unlike with Mae, Lilah, Madds, Phebe and Sapphira who had shown up on the MC compound in bad fucking shape, some biker TLC wasn't gonna cut it. Not this time. "Nothing Rider can do about it, and she won't make it a hundred miles, let alone six hundred 'cross state. She needs a real doctor, right here."  
AK didn't see much of her, wrapped in my cut and my arms as she was, but he could smell her as well as I could, so he agreed.  
"Get her to the van and out of here, then. Tell Ash to come in here with Trooper. We'll have a closer look at this shithole."  
Ash, Flame's little half-brother and full member of the Hades Hangmen MC, had adopted a pitbull mix called Trooper some years ago. Maddie had trained the 85 pound dog to be a teddy bear while at home (I was starting to suspect that that was his real factory setting), Flame made sure that he became a fucking cannonball with teeth in times of crisis, and Ash had trained him as a detection dog. Trooper had successfully sniffed out explosives, drugs, and corpses in the past. Styx hadn't been a fan at first because his bitch was wary of dogs, what with the big fucking scar from a dog bite on her calf, but now he sometimes mentioned that Troop was 'really more useful to the club than certain patched-in brothers'. (I had no idea who he could possibly referring to.)  
"Aye," I said and swiftly carried my precious if broken cargo out into the night, leaving AK behind at the house.

/

Near the west gate of the encampment, hidden behind a small hill, a massive Mercedes-Benz van was parked.  
The vehicle was technically Flame's, even though several MC members used it frequently. The psycho brother had bought it new two years ago, and gone a bit overboard reinforcing it with steel and bulletproof glass, turning the family van into a family fortress on wheels that guzzled gasoline like a hole in the ground.  
It transported MC members, goods and excess equipment to and from club business across Texas – and, on days off, ten rug rats, their inexplicably large amounts of _stuff_ , their moms, and a dog; to kindergarten, Walmart, the adventure pool, the doctor's, the dog park, wherever.  
Since Nazi-hunting had carried significant portions of the club's soldiers as far as fucking Idaho, I couldn't deny that having a reliable-as-fuck vehicle with that sort of loading capacity was mighty useful. Still, for Flame to be riding that thing almost exclusively and leaving his Fatboy in the garage was a fucking disgrace for a biker.  
I gave him shit for it, naturally – he was motherfucking Flame, after all, and over the last few years he had basically transformed into the biggest pussy in the club (which no one but me would ever have the balls to tell him to his face, and someone had to do it. Otherwise the brother would develop a fucking God complex and then where would we be?) – but I also knew that that van gave my brother the opportunity to learn. About the world, and life, all the shit normal people took for granted, shit he never had the chance to go through, what with his seriously fucked-up childhood and his mental wiring being different from everyone else's.  
His biological half-brother Ash, who had gone to school and got his GED in no time and was taking all kinds of classes like the brainiac he was, was something of a conduit between him and the real world – the one that he, Flame, wanted to show and share with his children as they grew up.  
I knew that the psycho was afraid that he wouldn't have anything to talk about with them down the road. There was only so much interest a small kid could have in the topics of bikes and knives, after all.  
So Flame and Ash were spending hours upon hours on the road in that van, sitting, talking about any odd thing, giving Flame the chance to figure out talking with people who weren't Madds, and how the fucking world worked. Meanwhile, a younger generation of Hangmen earned its place in the club out in the field, one drop of blood at a time.  
Life could really get fucking boring once your brothers started raising munchkins left and right.  
As I approached, Ash and Flame both jumped out and came my way.  
"What happened?" Ash asked, eyeing the human pile I was carrying around.  
"Found her." _That means I get to keep her._ I shook the thought away. "Nazis had her. Phebe and Sapphira type situation, looks like." I glanced at Flame and saw that he understood. He had been there, back then. Almost gone entirely psycho imagining that that might've been in store for his Maddie, too. We'd never taken him on another mission that involved brothels again.  
I also saw that he wasn't recognizing her. That was probably for the best. I sure as shit wasn't going to tell him her name just yet. Triggering Flame was just not a clever move, ever, but especially with Maddie over five hundred miles away.  
"She needs medical attention, ASAP."  
Ash pulled the van's sliding back door open. "I can find the nearest hospital-"  
"You're needed elsewhere," I interrupted. "AK wants you and Trooper at the house where I found her."  
"Site's all clear?" Flame asked, even though I was pretty certain he knew perfectly well that the site was all fucking clear, being in contact with Tanner and everyone else. But this was about Ash's safety, so of course he would make doubly sure.  
Ash heard and got it. I saw him wiping his mouth to hide an embarrassed little smile.  
"Yep. Nazis just went extinct in Texas," I assured him. "So they won't need their shit no more, which is where Lil' Ash and Troop come in."  
I gave Ash quick instructions about how to meet up with AK. Ash whistled a command, and Trooper jumped out of the dark bowels of the van, remarkably graceful for a dog his size, his brindled brown-and-tan fur shiny and healthy. His wet nose started twitching even as his clever amber eyes were focused entirely on Ash. No doubt he was checking out the corpse smell emanating from Sarai's body.  
Ash geared up quickly and then he and the dog quickly vanished toward the encampment. Flame got directions for the closest medical facility with his tablet while I deposited Sarai in the seat right behind the driver's that had been folded up before. The seat reclined almost all the way to a horizontal position, so I tried to get her comfortable on it. I wrapped her in the crinkly golden thermal blanket from the first aid kit until she looked like a Werther's candy, adding the two self-heating pads and putting them on her upper belly, and stuffed one of Isaiah's back-up baby blankets under her head as a pillow. I also tried to drip a little water onto her lips, but she was too out of it to swallow and I didn't want to drown her or get water into her lungs, so backed off.  
"Clearwood Treatment, Rehabilitation and Recovery Center, outside El Paso. 42 miles," Flame announced from the driver's seat where he checked his tablet. His voice was sounding a little dead. I supposed he wasn't a fan of driving into a place that would be real fucking similar to the one where his old man had him institutionalized. I shook my head. Brother was just gonna have to deal with it.  
42 miles was not exactly ideal under the circumstances, but they really were in the middle of nowhere. I was surprised that Flame's device even had data reception out here anyway.  
"Nothing closer than that?" I probed, fastening Sarai's seatbelt as well as I could and rearranging the boxes of stuff that had had to make way for her temporary bed.  
"Fucking nothing," Flame confirmed.  
That was probably literally the case. I'd be surprised if there were even a fucking Starbucks or a McDonald's closer to this godforsaken place than a one hour drive.  
I looked at Sarai, all bundled up and barely moving, and then thought of my Fat Boy that was waiting for me near the southern entry point where AK and I had taken up position before sundown, before going in and getting the slaughter started. It wasn't ideal to leave my stud out here, but I had to, for now. No way was I letting her outta my sight right now.  
"Let's go, then." I squeezed my six foot six into the passenger seat and slid it all the way back so I could easily keep an eye on the passed-out woman right behind Flame.  
"What if AK and Ash find another one?" Flame asked, looking straight out the windshield as if that would magically conjure the two of them up on the little hill. "Another bitch."  
I grit my teeth. He had a point. This van was the only vehicle we had around here that was fit for transporting people injured as badly as Sarai. AK would be stuck here with any additional prisoner they found.  
But those were hypothetical people. Sarai was real, and I was certain that she wouldn't make it if we waited another hour or two.  
"Drive. You can drop us off there and come back here right away." Probably a good idea, anyway, to let the brother know I wasn't expecting him to hang around the medical facility. "And I'll talk to Ky and Tanner, maybe they have another idea for that scenario." I got out my phone.  
Flame replied by turning the key in the ignition and speeding off toward Clearwood, outside El Paso.

/

On paper at least, Clearwood turned out to be a fucking fluke.  
On the phone with the VP and our resident Grand Computer Wizard, Tanner, I found out that the place was well-equipped and well-staffed, small and private – which meant that waving some money would open many doors, silence many questions and keep us away from snooping officials like police – and that they had 24 hour emergency admittance on top of a larger, integrated inpatient rehab institution for a whole range of physical and mental ailments. Perfect.  
As for the problem of how to get Sarai into that system: The head nurse listed on the website turned out to be a familiar face. Melanie Simmons, who was looking at me from her "Director of Nursing and Assistant Director of Business Management" staff photo on the Clearwood website, was known in the Austin chapter of the Hades Hangmen MC as Mels. She had been a club slut for several years, hanging around our compound during parties and switching regularly between brothers to keep her entertained in the evening and warm at night. I remembered her, or at least her face and her generous tits. She was a fun girl and a sweet drunk. We probably fucked a couple of times.  
Ky, who had seen her on the website first and pointed her out to me, told me that she had permanently split from the club maybe four, five years ago. "I don't think there was bad blood, though," he added.  
Some sluts got possessive and bitchy after a while, claiming men who didn't want to be claimed, causing drama, and had to be shown the door. Apparently, dear old Mels wasn't one of them. She just got older and wanted more from life than being just another club slut hanging around bikers, getting high or drunk and shooting shit for days on end. Fair enough.  
What Ky was trying to tell me was that maybe there was some old love for the club left in Mels that I could use to get the beat-up bitch into Clearwood. The girl had no papers, no social security number, no health insurance, not any of the crap that was needed nowadays to get a proper doctor to so much as look into your fucking direction. The way she looked, the emergency personnel would probably not turn her away because of their Hippocratic Oath or some shit, but I didn't just want her to be brought back from the brink of death. She clearly needed long term care, so that her body and her mind had a chance to heal after everything the fucking Nazis – and those cult cunts before that, and probably her shit parents before them – had done to her. Otherwise, what would've been the point of the whole rescue? Leaving her lying in that bed and blowing the whole dump sky-high with her still in it would have been kinder.  
Tanner let me know that he had activated a few numbers on several official databases – that's what he said he did anyway, I didn't have the faintest idea how that whole shit worked – so that I could use one of the official ID cards he had made for me. It would probably come in handy when checking Sarai in.  
Every member of the MC now had several fake papers at their disposal, each with different names and sets of data connected to them, all legit-looking. The one I found in the glove box of Flame's van, coincidentally, was the one with my actual, real given names and my mother's last name on it. I had requested it from Tanner specifically, a few years back.  
"Ulfr," I had said, spelling the name out. "Middle name 'Einar'. Last name 'Sorensen'."  
Tanner's fingers had stilled on their keyboard, and he had looked at me over the rim of his reading glasses with a faintly amused expression, eyebrows lifting. I could see that he didn't believe me when I said that _that_ was my real name, but he also found it unlikely that I had pulled a name like that out of my ass. To be fair, I wasn't the most imaginative of people, except maybe when it came to the many, many ways of using a gun.  
"What?" I lifted one eyebrow and one corner of my mouth in reply. "Got a problem with me being more Aryan than your mongrel ass?" As if comparing my definitely Germanic coloring – red-blond hair, blue eyes, bright pale skin that never bronzed – to his dark-blond-going-on-brown hair, brown eyes and easily tanning skin hadn't been enough to establish that as a fact at first glance.  
Tanner huffed out a laugh and shook his head, then resumed his typing, still grinning. "No problem at all, Mr Wolf Warrior, son of Soren."  
That gave me pause. Knowing the meaning of Old Norse names wasn't exactly part of general education, especially not for the average American. Then again, I supposed that even if Tanner and his elders weren't as genetically Nordic as Hitler's wet dreams, at least they had done their homework – for the future White Power Crotchfruit, no doubt, which Tanner himself would never beget now that he had his Latina bitch.  
Ah, life. Fucking hilarious.  
"Here," Flame announced, making me fucking jump and drop my ID card into the foot well. He had pulled up across the road from a rather unimpressive-looking squat construction with a brightly lit entrance area. A black-and-white no-nonsense sign next to the door read 'Clearwood Treatment, Rehabilitation and Recovery Center, Homestead Meadows North, El Paso, Texas, USA; founded 2001'. Apparently, Flame didn't want to come any closer than this to a place where people were drugged and tied to their beds. I couldn't fault him for that.  
"Fucking finally," I said, as if I was eager to get going and set my brilliant plan into motion or something. Truth was, the entirety of my plan thus far had three bullet points: haul this here bitch into that there facility, have them get her into stable condition so she didn't fucking die right away, and somehow – by asking nicely, paying a lot of money, blackmailing, threatening _, somefuckinghow_ – get them to treat for her long-term so that she wouldn't die right next week, either. The parts in between I was gonna have to play by ear, with the help of my real fake ID and one of my unlimited credit cards, both courtesy of Tanner, sweet, big-titted Mels and, I supposed, my charming personality. For starters, I had half a story pulled out of my ass about how Sarai had been kidnapped and tortured by some thugs from Ciudad Juarez and I had somehow got her out… and that was it. Slightly better than "I found her in a Nazi base 40 miles east which doesn't exist anymore by now because my brothers have probably blown it up, but I originally know her from a doomsday cult for which she killed and kidnapped people when she was a teenager".  
Still not the imaginative type.  
"You're gonna stay with her," my brother said suddenly, stopping me halfway in the process of opening my door.  
"That a question or an order?" I asked him. He had listened to the phone conversations I had had with Ky and Tanner. I had told them both the bare minimum, sold it like I was just dropping the no-name bitch off and heading back to the Nazi base in Hudspeth County with Flame right away so they wouldn't ask questions I didn't know the answer to.  
Apparently, my psycho brother from another mother knew me better than that, though.  
"Statement," Flame said. Fuck. He was not a happy camper. His inked-to-hell fingers drummed and fidgeted on the steering wheel.  
"Yeah, I guess I gotta stay a while," I hedged, but in my bones I already knew that I couldn't just hand her over and piss off, and that this would take longer than I was banking on. Maybe a lot longer. The way I knew American medical facilities, they'd barely tape her together and send her on her merry way with a large bill in a small white envelope, undocumented as she was, if I didn't stay and keep both eyes on her. She'd be dead or worse in less than a week. I couldn't let that happen, as stupid as it was to feel responsible for her at this point. "Make sure they take care of her like they should."  
"I don't fucking like it," Flame commented and glared at the building across the road as if it had offended him personally.  
If it had been anyone but Flame, I would have laughed and said 'Tough shit.'  
"I know you don't," I said instead. Reaching down into the foot well and picking up one of the smaller handguns I had stripped off my body a few miles back – because I couldn't walk into a medical center armed to the teeth…or maybe I _could_ , but I really rather _shouldn't_ – I stuffed the modified Beretta back into my right boot. A smaller-sized Bowie knife went into my left boot. I looked up at Flame who had been watching my actions. "How about now?"  
He glared at me, the muscles in his cheeks working, then turned away and gave a small nod. That was as approving as he was going to get, I supposed.  
Behind him, the reason for our being here flinched again, which made the thermal blanket rustle sharply. She had done so a few times on the way here, as if to remind me that she was still there, and still alive – or still dying. I didn't have a fucking clue what those spasms were all about. Nothing good, I'd wager. In any case, it got my focus back on track.  
"Take care of my bike for me," I said, flicked the keys over to him, and got out of the car.  
A few minutes later, Flame was driving off, and I was standing, stranded, on a sidewalk in El Paso at three in the morning, with a Beretta in my right boot, a knife in my left, a fake ID with a real name in my wallet next to my last 83 bucks in cash money, a hole in my gums that was still bleeding into my beard, and a mangled, naked, dying bitch in my arms.  
I wasn't the most imaginative, but even _I_ could imagine several dozen better ways to spend a fucking Saturday night.

/

 _ **Sarai**_

When I came to, it was one sense after the other.  
First, my skin came alive. I felt the pain from all over my body, from my middle, my chest, my throat, from between my toes and the entire length of my spine. My lips and nostrils screamed at me with every breath I took, the air of every inhalation cut at them like an icy knife. I was cold all over, but not numb.  
 _I wished I were numb._  
Taste. My mouth tasted like human waste and death, and like something sharper. It reminded me of the stinging taste of toilet cleaner, the one drink I would never forget.  
Then, suddenly, the other three senses were switched on and impressions barreled into me. A steady beeping, metal screeching and clanging on metal, faint voices growing louder, the nauseating smell of disinfectant and starchy rubber gloves that seeped over my tongue as well as into my nose, blindingly bright white walls and ceiling and curtains, a protracted, keening cry, the coppery scent of blood, the cloying scent of rot-  
Oh God.  
This was all so familiar.  
 _I was going to be sick._  
Because I had been here before, years ago.  
 _Oh God._  
It was happening all over again. My life, my death, again.  
Hell was not a place of fire and brimstone at all. It was an endless loop of days and nights of agony and misery that started over just when I thought I had _finally made it_.  
I opened my mouth and cried, even though the salt from my tears hurt my eyes and the skin of my face cracked open when I grimaced. I cried out of pain and shame and weakness. Out of a bottomless tiredness, like a big, fussy, inconsolable infant. For myself, out of pure self-pity, at the prospect of having to go through this again. And again. And over again. Out of fear, because I knew, I remembered so well what 'this' was.  
And this time was even worse because I knew exactly what lay ahead of me, and how it would feel, and that I would survive it all because it would just all start again, right here, in some hospital-  
 _Oh God. Please,_ please _. I know I do not deserve Your grace. But please, save me._ I howled in tears, trusting that, if there was a God, He would understand regardless.  
Behind the veil of tears, a dark brown blotch came into view against the stark white backdrop of the ceiling. My shoulders were pressed down by two firm weights.  
"Miss, settle down. Please. It'll be okay, you can calm yourself. Lay back, everything is alright. I'm right here."  
The sound of running feet, opening doors. I felt the cold draft of moving air cut against my thin, brittle skin.  
Hands on me. The grip so tight it hurt.  
"Relax."  
 _No!  
If You are there, please—God! Please!_  
The reek of iodine.  
A strong grip on my arm and a cold, hard sting. Rubber over my nose.  
"Notify her husband," I heard someone say, "He needs to decide-"  
Then my senses switched off again.

/ **TBC**


	4. Chapter 3

_Hello! Enjoy chapter 3!_

PART 2

 _ **Viking**_

My bones were still vibrating like a Twin Cam engine and I loved it. I had missed my Fatboy like other people missed cigarettes. Taking a long sip from the ale, I made a mental note to go back to El Paso the long way 'round, spend some quality time with my lovely machine, get reacquainted, say sorry that it had to be carted cross-state by Tanner on the back of a fucking truck like a piece of junk.  
Tanner sat silently next to me, one hand on his own beer, the other in his crotch. Or rather, on the phone he was fiddling with very close to his crotch.  
"Prez call?" I eventually asked. He was mighty preoccupied. "Or are you diddling yourself down there?"  
Tanner didn't look up. "Nah."  
"Lita snapchat you some nudes, then?"  
That got a reaction. He squinted at me, murder in his eyes. I smirked.  
"Don't call her that. In fact, don't say her name at all." If looks could kill, I'd be mince meat. As it was, I only kept on smirking.  
"Couldn't help but miss the fact that you were in El Paso for a full two days before you finally passed me the memo. Inquisitive minds couldn't help but draw some conclusions about what you were up to all that time." Two days I could have been away from Mels and on the fucking road, too. Asshole.  
"Prez said Roswell wasn't urgent and Guerrero would make time whenever." Tanner shrugged his huge fucking shoulders and went back to his phone as if that concluded the topic.  
Concluded, my pale Nordic ass.  
"So you're finally making that shit official and gettin' her out, or you gonna keep waffling around until her papi finally marries her off to some drug lord from El fucking Salvador?"  
"Shut your fucking mouth, Vike, or I'm gonna give your new dentist more to do."  
I just laughed, flashing my brand new silver incisor at him. The good people of Clearwood had kindly recommended doctor Estevez to me, and for a nice, tidy sum he'd done a fantastic job. Two quick surgeries, good drugs so I didn't feel a thing, and I looked fierce as fuck now. (Not that I hadn't looked fierce before.)  
Right this moment, I didn't want to press my luck with Tanner's bad temper any further and kept my wisdom to myself. The Roswell chapter's prez, Guerrero, would soon rock up to this bar with his entourage to meet up and talk some, and I figured it would cast a bad light on Texas Hangmen if they were brawling with each other like a bunch of seven foot tall, two hundred fifty pound high school kids. Right now wasn't exactly a good time to give Styx a reason to chew me out, both from Styx' side as well as from my side of things. _Low profile, Vike.  
_ "It's complicated," Tanner suddenly said, sighed and put his phone in his pocket.  
"Horseshit," I snorted and earned another glare. "You want the bitch, bitch wants you. Nothin' complicated about that. Life's too short for long distance relationships and you two been needlessly dancing around each other for almost a decade. Like a bunch of closeted fags at the Vatican." I was surprised the whole thing hadn't blown up long ago anyway. First the Hangmen went to war with Garcia and the Quintana cartel, whose head asshole was Adelita's daddy. By rights, Tanner and Lita should've imploded then, but daddy had shipped her out to Portugal for a few years to get her out of the line of fire. After she had come back, they had started sneaking around.  
None of that shit made any sense to me, especially not that they were successful.  
A gigantically tall Nazi-inked white dude wouldn't exactly blend in in Mexico, but Tanner had been sneaking over the border again and again to see his bitch like Romeo fucking Montague climbing up the flower trellis.  
And Adelita was the only daughter of a cartel dynasty. The only reason I could think of for why she actually wasn't long married at her 31 years was that she was one of those fire-breathing, chancla-throwing, only-child Latina cunts who had her daddy wrapped around her little finger and kept scaring every suitor away by digging her fake nails into his ball sac. None of that spelled "low key", either.  
Still, as far as I could tell, she and Tanner were still a secret on the other side of the imaginary border wall.  
"She thinks she's pregnant," he said flatly.  
Woah.  
"Fuck, man," I replied and tried to picture Tanner with his half-covered White Power tats and his mean fucking mug as a baby daddy. It didn't work. Then again, I two years ago I wouldn't have been able to picture Flame as one, either, and nowadays there was always at least one diaper-clad baby butt fused to his body somewhere, causing ovaries to explode in his vicinity.  
Then, I did the math in my head. For a woman to 'think' she was pregnant, that would mean two months, three maximum. Had Tanner even been out of Austin in the past few months? With all the Nazi shit coming down the stretch, we had all been busy as fuck for quite some time.  
"Yeah. Not mine," Tanner confirmed suspicions and took a long drink from his bottle like he wanted to punish his beer for the shit situation.  
"Fuck," I repeated and suddenly got fucking pissed at some spic pussy I had never even seen. "You gonna go postal over that?" I asked sharply.  
The club couldn't afford to lose Tanner. He and his computer skills had become a vital part of our operation. With the exception of Tanner and AK's nephew Zane, most of the MC brothers were seriously old-skool and low-tech, even though this was 20-fucking-18. Zane was our computer whizz in training but he still had a lot to learn. Plus, the kid was still not sure about his place in the club in general, what with him having a raging boner for Slash, our resident homophobe. Long story short, we couldn't lose Tanner. Not for another couple years at least. Not to mention that I liked the fucker. He was one of the few who were taller and bigger than me and he was fun to brawl with.  
Tanner shook his head, but the gesture didn't mean 'no' so much as 'I'm done talking about this, and so are you, or else'.  
We drank, and stewed, in silence for a couple of minutes. Guerrero was due any second now.  
"AK tell you that he and Trooper found some interesting stuff in that Nazi hovel?" Tanner suddenly asked.  
"Nope," I said, accepting the change of topic. From the radio silence, I had figured they hadn't found shit, blown the place up and gone home – to party without me and spend some quality time with the family. Then again, I hadn't exactly called AK or Ash back to ask about it, either. The fewer opportunities for questions about the Sarai situation – or the Mels situation – the better. "What did they find?"  
"'bout twenty thousand in cash, five thousand in pills, some digital drives I'm still cracking, and sixteen bars of authentic fucking Nazi gold. With the Hakenkreuz embossed on it and everything. Oh, and they were storing liquid explosives in that water tower like fucking morons."  
"Oh shit," I laughed. Blind luck that none of us had hit that tower with a bullet, then. Must've been a very pretty bang in the end, though. Shame I hadn't been there.  
"And the Obernazi who lived in that dump had four girls buried in his back yard." Tanner dipped a fry into sauce and threw it in his mouth, as if he hadn't just punched me in the guts.  
I gave him a long look. "Did he now?"  
"Looks like he got himself a new one every time he'd used up the old one," Tanner explained darkly. "One was only bones, two halfway there. The last one was in the ground maybe half a month. Looked maybe sixteen years old. Well-preserved, too. He dolled her up, pumped her full of plastic so she wouldn't rot away too fast, put her in a bag. She only recently started decomposing. Wouldn't be surprised if he kept fucking her after she'd gone cold."  
"I really fucking hate Nazis," I growled. My stomach clenched like a fist. I recalled the laundry list of injuries and sicknesses Dr. McGowan had discussed with me the day after I had dropped Sarai into Clearwood, the sum of which would easily equal death for a weaker person. Apparently, Sarai was a fighter, though. She would _not_ become number five. I cleared my throat. "Did you find out how he got them in the first place? Anything leading back to Quintana, again?"  
Human trafficking in Texas, female trafficking in particular, was firmly in the hands of a sprawling cartel from Mexico. One of theirs, Juan Garcia, had tried to buy Phebe, Sapphira and seven-year-old Grace from Meister some six years ago. He had also fucked with Ky's sister Elysia before that, forcing her to go into hiding for years. The Hangmen, Ky and Hush in particular, had hunted the fucker down and massacred him, saving Sia and Cowboy just in time, but the kill had been like a sting into a wasp's nest. Ever since then, we had been continually busy pulling traffickers out by the roots they had been taking on our turf, but those fuckers just kept popping up, kinda like Nazis, and the number of trafficked women and girls was always rising. Not much of a stretch, figuring out that the four stiffs and the barely-alive one were linked to that whole mess.  
Tanner tipped his chin. "The digital drives I found-"  
"Odin's mighty cock! Viking!"  
A brown-skinned, black-haired, pot-bellied dude in a cut, black pants and cheap-assed bamboo sandals came toward our table. Except for the cut, he looked like the most average, cheerful middle-aged Mexican you could find on shutterstock, but I knew he was neither Mexican nor average and that the cheery attitude was nothing but a front. I had seen him cut a guy's throat open and pull out his larynx and tongue because he had said some things he didn't like, all without taking the joint out of his mouth.  
"Guerrero." I stood to greet him properly, and nodded to his shadow, a smaller man called Claw who had been with us in Naziville the week before and who, like Tanner, was also ex-Klan. I introduced the two and Tanner, then hailed the bartender for another round of drinks and snacks. Inconspicuously, all the customers sitting on tables in earshot left or moved away.  
We talked in low tones about the Hudspeth operation and the loot, then about general club business, me relaying information and orders from Styx and Ky, him asking questions and favors from the mother chapter's official emissary. Claw and Tanner talked cyber-shit, Klan-shit and bikes. The worn-out looking bartender kept the beers and fries coming.  
I was just stepping out for a leak when my phone vibrated in my pocket. The caller was unknown, but the area code was 915. El Paso.  
Mels. I groaned.  
Yet another new number? I already had four of hers saved to my contacts – for the sole purpose of not answering the phone when she called.  
Fuck me. I didn't have time for this.  
I took the call anyway. Could always fake bad reception. "Yeah?"  
"Hello, is this Mr Ulfr Sorensen?"  
A woman, but that was not Mels' voice, and Mels wouldn't call me by that name anyway. I breathed. "Who's this?" The voice was faintly familiar, but the mobile connection wasn't exactly stellar.  
"Mr Sorensen, this is Dr. Paige McGowan, from the Clearwood treatment center in El Paso."  
Why was she calling me? This was a bad sign, wasn't it?  
"Yeah?" I said again.  
"I'm calling to notify you personally that your wife has woken from the coma. We needed to put her under again with anesthetics to prevent her from doing additional damage to herself, but we expect her to gain full lucidity within the next five to six hours. In my opinion, it would be advantageous if you were there to support her. A familiar face can be of great help in a difficult transitional phase like that."  
Fuck. My stomach suddenly felt hollow. _A familiar face_ – yeah, no. If she remembered me, and I doubted it, she would see a Hangman biker who had no doubt intimidated the piss out of her six years ago. _What the fuck did I get myself into with this?  
_ "Mr Sorensen? Are you still there?"  
"Yes, I am." I heaved a breath and made a decision – the only one I could, if I was being honest. "I'm in New Mexico at the moment. Can be back in two hours, the earliest."  
"Very well. We will have to discuss further therapeutic approaches and surgical procedures as well, and I once again would like you to consider taking your wife's case to the authorities. In light of her condition, I would like to impress on you the severity of…"  
During her short speech, some guy had come into the bathroom. He looked over at me from his urinal. His nosy fucking face told me that he could make out the doctor's words through my phone's internal speaker.  
"I'll think about it while I'm on the way, doc. Thank you for calling me." I hung up and left the bathroom with one last glare at Curious George standing there at the pissoir with his shrinking dick in his hand, letting him know that he was lucky I was in a hurry.  
"Guerrero, I'm gonna have to cut this meeting short." I didn't even sit back down at the table. Guerrero, Claw and Tanner looked up at me, confused.  
"Something or someone creep up your butthole while you were on the shitter, Vike?" Guerrero asked. His face and tone showed amusement but I knew he was pissed. This wasn't exactly proper MC etiquette. He was as much a prez as Styx. People didn't walk out on him.  
I groped around in my brain for a plausible excuse and found one. "Quintana situation in El Paso. It's urgent."  
Tanner frowned while both Guerrero and Claw got up from their seats at the mention of the name. "Motherfucker. We're coming."  
Fuck. I shook my head. "This is Texas business. Prez already has people underway. Thanks for the offer. And thanks for the hospitality. I'll let Styx know your plans. Stay in touch." I turned and left the bar.  
Tanner caught up with me as I was getting onto my bike.  
"What the fuck is this about, Vike?" he hissed, gripping the handlebars from the front. "Since when are you into sneaky shit?" Of course he knew I was making shit up. Dude had a lie detector in the tip of his dick. Also, Styx would have called _him_ first about any Quintana situation that could have come up to coordinate properly.  
I glared at his hands that were still clamped on to my bike. This was kinda like grabbing your old lady's ass. Wisely, Tanner let go, but didn't step out of the way.  
"Does this have to do with Clearwood?" He knew I had checked in with my fake ID and paid a considerable amount of money to the institution with one of the credit cards. Probably also knew about the fake wife I'd had committed, whose treatment that money was paying for. Then again, maybe he'd been too busy with his own bitch problems to go that far. Yet.  
I hesitated, then nodded. "Got pussy there," I told him. It wasn't technically a lie.  
Tanner lifted his eyebrows, then smirked. "Fuck me. Something serious with that Mels bitch, then?"  
I nodded, shrugging away his sardonic laughter. "Got some work to do to lure her back into Hades, man. Gotta ride in like a fucking knight on a white horse, save her from her piece of shit soon-to-be ex-husband who just reappeared on her doorstep. Real medieval chivalry shit." Fuck me, the lies came easier and easier. Maybe I was the imaginative type after all?  
The worst part was that I suddenly wasn't sure exactly why I was lying to him.  
Tanner sobered up and gave me a long Schutzstaffel-soldier look with his dark x-ray-vision eyes. I had to fight to not blink or turn away.  
"Well, then," he eventually said, and I figured he had decided to buy my bullshit for the moment but could smell that this wasn't the entire load. "I'll finish up here and get the protocol to Styx. You owe me one, Vike."  
"I do," I agreed and started the engine.  
The back of my neck prickled as I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road, letting me know that Tanner was watching me the entire way until I disappeared behind a bend. Brother was too sharp-sighted by half.  
I decided to deal with him once the time came. Right now, I had a dying 'wife' to tend to, an overzealous doctor to talk out of calling the cops and bringing on the rape kits, and a needy former club slut to satisfy.  
Fuck my life.

/

 _ **Sarai**_

Flashes of light that stabbed into my eyes, then nothing. Had I lost my eyesight?  
A furious scream echoed through the darkness.  
Pain in the soles of my feet.  
My lungs burned.  
Colors. Lights.  
The sharp smell of sweat and the biting stench of bile.  
A sting in my abdomen.  
The sense of vertigo.  
Then, for a short moment that teetered on the edge of a blade, I was suspended in a landscape made of snow. It was cold and quiet and I was weightless in it. I floated like a snowflake, mid-air, swaying side to side, up and down again. So peaceful.  
A sharp inhale of breath, and the moment fell, split in half, to both sides of the blade.  
My mouth, throat and lungs were on fire.  
It was not weightless. I did not float. I was sunken into a cot and the weight of the air on my body felt enormous enough to squash me underneath it like a bug under a boot.  
I panicked. I could not draw breath. The room was spinning – I was in a room, not in the snow, just a white room-  
 _I do not remember this room._  
-with white walls and ceiling and a big window-  
 _Why do I not remember this-  
_ "She's really coming to now. Normal reflexes."  
A voice. From where?  
"Miss, if you can hear me, you can just stay put. Relax. Everything is fine."  
No, everything was _not_ fine. I felt like a shattered vase. Every crack and splinter hurt.  
 _Oh God, it hurts!_  
"I know, honey. I'll give you something for the pain in a moment. Try to relax anyway. I'll go get doc-." The last bit was so unclear and faint I couldn't make out the words any more.  
I tried to swallow, but my throat was sandpapered raw. The taste of blood rose to my mouth. I coughed and coughed again. I was _drowning_.  
"Alright, enough with this. You sit up for a hot second, sugarbun."  
A much deeper voice – _a man's_ -, closer, followed by a warm, firm, painful touch against my back and a push.  
I was hoisted up. One hand on my back, one in the center of my chest, both of them so large and hard. He was too strong. I could not resist.  
Strong men. Stronger than me. Being manhandled. That, I remembered.  
The world started spinning vertically as well as horizontally. My brain seemed to slosh around in my skull. I whimpered through another cough which came slightly easier now that I was upright, but hurt twice as much.  
"Let's wash that down. Just a sip. Easy."  
Something poked my dry lips, then nudged against my teeth.  
"Suck," he said, then mumbled something unintelligible.  
I remembered _that_ as well. I grimaced.  
"It's water," he said, and in an instant I was a being entirely made of thirst. I closed my chapped lips around what I now recognized was a straw and greedily sucked on it. The first splash of liquid in my mouth was cool heaven, and then everything seemed to break open – the lining of my cheeks, my tongue, my gums, the back of my throat, my esophagus especially. I spat and collapsed, moaning in pain.  
Or I would have. His hand was still holding me up, so instead I just bowed forward.  
I blinked through tears and peeked up at the person who was touching me.  
I shrank back.  
He was a _giant_ of a man. Long, light-red hair and a thick, darker beard framed cold blue eyes that looked at me with an annoyed, stern expression. His bulging shoulders were roughly twice the width of mine, leading to massive upper arms and a barrel chest that were barely contained by a dark grey shirt. He was sitting next to my cot, but I was certain that if he stood up, he would tower over me like a literal _tower_. He already looked to be hewn from stone, foreboding and fearsome.  
 _I do not remember him.  
_ That made it worse. Whatever he had done to me – and would do to me – must have been so horrendous that my memory had suppressed it.  
His gaze held mine. It was like ice. I shivered under it, then lowered my head like I had been taught so many years ago, as if old mannerisms could save me from him, and took very small breaths.  
He pulled his hand away. _For now._  
"Can you speak?"  
I did not dare reply or react.  
"Fuck," he swore quietly and huffed out his breath in a frustrated manner. "At least nod if you're listening."  
I hesitated. Was it wise to nod an affirmative? Did I _want_ to listen to what this stranger had to say to me?  
"I can see the cogs turning in your head, so I'll just take that as a fucking nod. Listen, then. From this point onwards, your only fucking job is to do as the doctors and nurses say. Got it? _You_ don't give _them_ trouble, _I_ won't give _you_ trouble. That easy."  
Doctors. Nurses. I was in a hospital, then? I remembered hospitals. Places of powerlessness and dependence and aching pain.  
"I'll take that silence as a 'yes'. Fantastic. Fucking harmonious marriage."  
I did not understand him. His speech was vulgar.  
He got up and left the room. I did not dare lift my gaze to watch him go, but I felt the pressure alleviate once he was gone.  
Moments later, a black woman, maybe forty years of age, came through the door with a silvery tray in one hand and a white paper cup in the other. Her name tag said 'Brown, RN' next to a stamp-like emblem I could not see clearly.  
"Alright, so I've got some stronger analgesics for you here that might-"  
"Who was he?" My voice was painful, both producing it and hearing it. "That man. Why was he here?"  
Nurse Brown's painted-on eyebrows lifted up, then her expression settled on 'sympathetic'. "You've been through a lot. Don't you worry. It'll all come back to you in time. Just relax."  
"What is your meaning?" I asked, suppressing a new coughing fit.  
"Do you remember your name, Miss?"  
Did I?  
"Sa… Sarai."  
"And your last name?"  
I had never had a last name. I was always simply Sarai.  
The nurse seemed to misunderstand my silence. "See, that's what I mean. You'll just have to give yourself some time. Your body will heal, and so will your memory. Until then, you just relax and let the doctor take a look at you. You can take these pills for me, and then you go to sleep."  
I did not know what to say to that – or rather, I did, but my voice would not support the anger that came flashing through my chest. I did not _want_ my body healed! To what _purpose?_ Just to break it again?! To prolong this hell!And my memory – bah! My memory was _completely intact_ , much to my despair!  
"Who. Was. That man?" I asked again, with emphasis. I was shaking now.  
"Honey, that was your husband," the nurse said with a huff, clearly not liking my tone even though she tried hard to keep hers cordial. "He has brought you here, donated a good pint of his blood to you, too, because you both have the same rare blood type. He was called when you woke up the first time and has hardly left your side since to make sure he'd be here when you were finally lucid. Seems to me that finally seeing you wake up, in considerable pain and so confused, has hit him deep – as I told him it would, but he wouldn't listen. It's a distressing situation for everyone, even for a big, strong man. But, as I said, with time, things will come back to you and once your body has healed further-"  
I had virtually stopped listening after the word 'husband'.  
 _Husband._  
That man, whom I had never seen in my life – _or had I?_ – whose name I did not know and whose stern face and large body and hard hands made me cower, was wedded to me?  
 _Impossible._  
My mother had told me that I would be wedded to the Prophet, a man who was closer to being a God than a man. Even though my road had been serpentine, true to her word, I had met the true Prophet, Judah, eventually and he had picked me, awakened me, and made me his in every way once I had finished my teaching. He had reigned over me as a husband for many years, although we had not shared the vows before God. Judah had said that we would officially join in marriage after the war against the Devil's men was won.  
I knew in my heart that I had not shared vows with _this_ man, either. It was unthinkable. He was _not_ close to God. His aspect was that of a demon from hell, that of a devil. I could _not_ be bound to a devil.  
 _But what if I was?_ The thought sent cold dread through me. What if I was married to him and forgot? What if that unholy union was the reason for my perdition, my inability to die?  
I needed to get out.  
I needed to get out of here, away from him. I needed to get back to my Prophet, I needed-  
"You take one of these with a good sip of water, and we'll see if it takes full effect or if you need-"  
With my entire body thrumming with adrenaline that numbed all my aches for the moment, I whipped open the blanket to free my legs and kicked at Nurse Brown just as she bent toward me with her tray. I hit her in her tummy, not very hard because I was too weak, but it was enough to frighten her as much as push her. She staggered backward and into a trolley that stood bedside, then toppled over along with it. Her cry of surprise and pain was almost drowned out by the deafening crash of thin metal and plastic.  
I did not waste time watching her. I slid my legs out of the bed and stood, swayed because my feet and legs were weak and stiff, but managed to keep my balance by first grabbing on to the bed and then half-falling towards, half-lunging for the doorframe.  
A cry of pain slipped from my mouth when an injection needle ripped out of the skin on my wrist. It was attached to a plastic hose that led to a strange metal-and-plastic framework from which several clear bags were dangling. The line snapped taut, my skin gave and blood immediately sprayed down my arm and onto the floor.  
I could not pay attention to it, or to Nurse Brown's cries and moans. As fast as I could – not very fast, _not nearly fast enough!_ – I moved out the door, then turned right down a sandy-colored corridor, toward an unknown destination. I kept my hand on the wall the whole time.  
Weapons. I needed a weapon, no matter if it were a gun or a broomstick. I should have taken the needle with me! Or anything from that broken trolley – I had seen the glint of metal and I should have—No. I shook my head fast to focus. I could not go back and I needed to focus on the now. I kept my eyes open for something, anything, even though my vision was blurry and sluggish.  
As my fingers brushed along the wall, they suddenly hit a small red metal box with a white window in its center. On the top, it said 'FIRE', and 'BREAK GLASS, PRESS HERE' was printed onto the glass panel in the middle.  
A fire alarm. It would evacuate the hospital. I would be able to escape in the confusion. I just needed to break the glass.  
I hammered against it with the heel of my hand, but quickly realized that I would need a tool. _God, I was so weak._ My hand throbbed in pain.  
Panicking, I looked around and caught sight of a yellow plastic sign that showed a stick figure in the process of falling backwards and read "CAUTION; WET FLOOR". It stood in the middle of the corridor, barely six feet away, but I felt as if it stood on the moon.  
Inhaling as deeply as I could, I hobbled toward it and hefted the sign – it was surprisingly solid, weighed down at the bottom – and then, with as much force as I could muster, smashed its corner into the little pane of glass covering a fire alarm button. I missed the first time, hitting the wall instead. The repulsion vibrated through the plastic and my hand screamed in so much pain I almost dropped the sign.  
The second time, I hit the little window, but not hard enough. There was merely a crack in the glass. A frustrated yell bubbled up from my chest.  
"Sarai!" The deep voice boomed so loudly, my fearful heart skipped a beat. "Knock it off, right fucking now!"  
He was coming up right behind me. Adrenaline spiked again. My heart raced, and so did my blood.  
Almost blindly, I swung the sign like a bat or a sword. The momentum of my makeshift weapon had my feet slipping, then its slippery plastic weight was suddenly gone from my fingers and I was tipping over.  
I hit the floor face-first, a little less forcefully than I had anticipated, but still hard enough for the shockwave to knock all of my breath out of me, and to make all of my bones vibrate like a gong. Deep inside my torso, several sharp pains flared up, so hotly that tears shot into my eyes. I coughed and felt a mouthful of liquid spatter over my lips, tasting like copper pennies – blood.  
A hand between my shoulder blades pressed me down, followed by another that almost covered the entire side of my head with its broadness, something – a knee and shin? – pressed into the hollows of my knees and pinned my own knees to the ground. My left hand was trapped underneath my own body.  
I was a butterfly under a pin. A bug under a boot.  
"No! No! No!" I kept shouting with what little air I had, and flailed around with my free right hand. I jerked my shoulders around and bucked my whole body with as much strength as I could muster to try and escape from underneath him.  
In my mind, I knew it was useless. I was small and weakened to boot, and he was big and heavy and a man. Worse still, if he really was my husband, my rejection of him was sinful and shameful.  
But my body and heart refused to capitulate.  
He was pressing my left temple onto the cold, damp linoleum floor. He said something to me with his low, deep voice, but the words blurred against the pounding rush of blood in my ears and my steady chant of 'no! no! no!'  
After a scant few seconds later, my energy was utterly drained. I sucked in great, heaving breaths that did not seem to arrive in my lungs and soon felt the once-familiar waves of cold start to spread from my torso outward into my limbs.  
As soon as the cold had overtaken my body, all I would be able to do was lie there and gasp like a fish out of water, and then endure the joining. I was already imagining the size of this man's organ. He was so large of stature that his penis would certainly be long and thick as well. I could not help but wonder whether he would start with my vagina or with my anus. _Please let it be the former._ It was slightly less painful and less repugnant that way.  
A sob rose from my sternum and crawled its way out of my throat before I could stop it. I tried to cover it with a frustrated braying, not sure whom I was trying to fool.  
"Fuck. Calm down, bitch," he said to me, his mouth near my ear. His long hair tickled my skin. "You're scaring the crap outta the staff again and bleeding all over the fucking floor."  
He was so calm and aloof that it made me furious, and then even more scared.  
"Kill me!" I yelled, my voice pitched impossibly high, and bucked one last time. "Kill me, now!"  
The wide palm pressing my skull to the floor slid toward the back of my head once, twice, before I realized that he was… petting me? His fingers combed through my stringy hair, exposing the shell of my ear until I could feel first the cold air of my surroundings, and then his warmer breath on it.  
"I don't fucking take orders from you, sugarbun," he said, enunciating every word clearly and emphatically as if to make sure I understood. "Try asking nicely next time."  
"Please-" I started, but he interrupted me with a tisk.  
"Thanks, though. You're making this shit easier for me."  
I heard the smug smile in his voice and tried to turn my head to look him in the eye.  
"Why are you doing this to me?" I demanded. _This_ bodily force. _This_ medical treatment he had apparently arranged for me to receive. _This_ strange charade. _This_ life of mine. _THIS._  
"You are _not_ my husband," I cried out. "You are not _anything_ to me and I am not anything to _you_. To what end are you deceiving everyone? _Who_ are you? _Why are you doing this?_ ". Where was Judah? Why had he left me? He _loved_ me. How could he have allowed a man like this to touch me? Not knowing what was happening to me… it was corroding my sanity.  
He took the pressure off my head so that I could finally turn it and see his face. One look at him and I knew that I would not get any satisfying, truthful answers from this man. He was disingenuous and malicious to the core.  
He smirked but there was something false about it. Something forced and secretly unhappy. His eyes didn't move, the smile didn't reach them. And he seemed… tired.  
"Because I already paid for it," he lied to me. "You're fucking welcome."  
Then he handed me over to a couple of nurses who were coming down the corridor toward us. They pulled me to my feet and held me up because my legs were still too bloodless and rubbery to do their task, and wedged my limp arms into a jacket that got tied shut at the back until I was unable to move freely or use my hands. The nurses made me sit in a small wheelchair. The metal and plastic parts that pressed into my bare legs were cold to the touch. I shivered as they discussed with each other and the man what would be happening to me next. The words 'closed ward' and 'supervision' were mentioned.  
"This is for your own good, sugarbun," the stranger said as the women pushed me past him and down the corridor, back into the direction I had come from. "You'll get better in no time."  
It sounded like a threat, and it made me shiver with fear.

/ **TBC**


	5. Chapter 4

_Hi! Enjoy chapter 4!_

 **Viking**

"Oh, God! Yes! Yes! Right theraaah!"  
 _Mr Sorensen, it's been two weeks since your wife regained consciousness and was entered into our physio-psychological treatment program. What are your thoughts on-  
_ "Vike! Yes!"  
 _\- has not been very successful. The trauma is, of course, extensive. Physically, she is definitely on the way to full recuperation, even if I would like to keep administering antibiotics for any further venereal diseases she has contracted, and also schedule additional surgeries to further reduce the scar tissue in her throat and esophagus and excise the uterine fibroids that cause-  
_ "Harder! God, please, harder!"  
 _When it comes to her mental state, I'm afraid that expectations need to be lowered drastically._  
That sobbing cry of _"KILL ME!"  
-is apparently convinced that she is fourteen years of age, or rather, that she has been re-born at this age after her violent death. Since the chemical withdrawal has been completed and she shows none of the usual signs of continuing physical addiction, I can only assume that this conviction has nothing to do with the drugs' immediate effect on her brain chemistry, but that it may be a more complex belief that is rooted deeply in her mind and will take a longer period of time to correct. She has also repeatedly spoken about a man named Judah whom she believes to be her companion, lover and husband-  
"You are _not _my husband!"  
-not cooperative. We have no choice but to sedate her routinely. It is not a method I-  
_"Yes! Ah! Yes! Yes!"  
 _If you do not want to consider a referral to a more specialized institution-_  
 _-have come to the conclusion that it would be beneficial to involve you more in her healing process. I know that this is also not easy for you, seeing that she seems to have no memory of you-  
_ "Fuck...! Oooooh!"  
 _-expect much better results with you in attendance, despite the negative reaction she has shown at your initial meeting.  
"Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?!"_  
"Fuck!"  
 _We might discuss a guided conversation therapy, or forms of therapy like writing exercises, mild hypnoses, suggestion therapy that uses music, sounds, scents or touches, gentle massage treatments or water relaxation methods. I believe it to be in both of your interest to start with conversation therapy right away, to maximize contact with her actual past with you-  
"You are _not _my husband!"_  
 _"You are going to stay with her. Statement."_ _  
_"I'm gonna cum. I'm gonna cum. I'm-"  
 _-and to further administer certain drugs to positively influence her development-  
"Since when are you into sneaky shit?"  
I sincerely believe that we can help you. You both. Together, you can find your way back to one another-  
_"Please don't stop! Please don't stop!" _  
I believe you both need to heal, in different ways, and that you can do so together.  
_ "Ahhhhh G- Go-d!"  
 _Together.  
"WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!"_  
"Fuck…!"  
I pumped one last time into the tight heat that was Mels' pussy. My cum dribbled into the condom and my cock was already getting soft again, like this was the merciful end of a too-long, punishing physical exercise that had not been any fun at all and he was just glad that it was finally over.  
I should have gotten drunk before getting in bed with her.  
Mels moaned one last time, fingering herself to come down from her orgasm, but I was already rolling away from her and dealing with the condom.  
"Babe , that was amazing," Mels sighed happily and writhed around in the messed-up sheets. I didn't spare her a glance and didn't bother to tell her again that she should stop calling me 'babe'.  
"You said John's gonna be back four-thirty the latest?" I asked again and stepped into my pants.  
Mels huffed. "Yeah. But we've still got time-!"  
I knew what she was doing and I wasn't fucking playing along. I had enough shit on my plate and zero interest in being part of a domestic drama.  
"I've got shit to do," I said, checking the timer on my phone. Three fifty-five. My appointment was at five. Plenty of time.  
Mels huffed again, sadly this time. "You're always so busy."  
God, that whiny tone.  
"Club needs me," I said by the way of an excuse and pulled on my shirt.  
Truth was, the club didn't need me. I had nothing to do except drive from Clearwood to Mels' place to my dinky motel room, and _wait_ , and it was starting to drive me nuts.  
I had been in El Paso more than three weeks now, and with the exception of Tanner's communication in regards to my Fatboy and the meeting with Guerrero, I had got exactly one message. From Flame. Comprised of exactly two words. Pretty sure that Madds had talked him into sending it, too. Apparently, all my other fucking brothers were just glad I wasn't around to hog their munchkins and teach them some more proper language and manners.  
As if it was my fault they loved their Uncle Vike more than them.  
It was stupid that the radio silence was getting to me, but it was the icing on the shit cake. I was fucking alone – not something I was used to after decades at the Hangmen compound and the cabins, always with at least one brother by my side. I was not even fifteen miles from official Diablos territory, running without my cut to not pull any more undue attention. Then again, the only place a six foot six ginger dude with a beard and an attitude like mine might go unnoticed was Valhalla.  
Also, El Paso was not a great city to begin with. Sweaty hot, flat, full of shifty-looking Mexicans and border patrol cops, shitty, lukewarm beer and food that made me shit lava.  
And on top of that, I was getting myself more and more trapped in the Clearwood situation, and there was zero I could do about it.  
For Sarai to get her treatment, therapy, antibiotics, surgeries and all that crap that only seemed to get more elaborate and costly by the day, I needed to keep up appearances with Dr. McGowan, who had faithfully consulted me every two days since I showed up with my credit card and my half-dead, undocumented fake wife, and who now wanted me more involved because Sarai was 'not cooperating' since she had woken up two weeks ago.  
Which Sarai never would, because her crazy ass life story – Prophets and prophecies involving child rape and the literal Second fucking Coming – was neither the result of the drugs nor the fucking Syphilis the Nazis had given her, nor of some brainwash-rape-PTSD-trauma in the specific sense, but the sad fucking truth. Obviously, Dr. McGowan couldn't know that, since I had sold her very hard on my fake story about Sami weddings and bad hombres abducting my lovely bride during our honeymoon in Mexico. She believed me and not Sarai because hairy but lucid dudes with unlimited money who were vouched for by high-ranking staff were marginally more believable than drugged-up, delirious rape victims who insisted that they were 14 years old when they were clearly not and screamed Bible verses as they threw themselves off the surgery couch.  
Yes, Sami weddings. Sarai and I apparently got married in the beautiful town of Bumfuck, Off-The-Grid County, Norway – Sarai's newly minted home country, too – which was why we had no wedding rings and no US-recognized wedding license and why Sarai didn't show up in any database to begin with. Gotta love those eccentric luddite minorities.  
And apart from Sarai herself, the only one who knew that it was all an ever-growing big, fat pile of bullshit and doctored the books accordingly was the aforementioned high-ranking staff member who, upon seeing me at the front counter of her place of employment, had creamed in her medical scrubs and then happily vouched for me.  
Mrs Director of Nursing and Assistant Director of Business Management had the power to release, remit or generally move patients around within the entire institution, or so she had told me. One word from Mels, and Sarai would be entered into the therapeutic program she needed… or out on her half-healed ass – and then probably handed over to the authorities, just like I would no doubt be flagged for fraud, if not accused of having caused all those injuries to Sarai's body and mind myself.  
Therefore, all I could do at this point was nod through everything Dr. McGowan was telling me, and try to keep Mels' mouth shut. Or full of my cock, something she demanded anyway. Turned out her travelling salesman of a husband had a small dick and wasn't mentally prepared to keep her satisfied, not to mention that he was absent three weeks out of every month and completely uninterested in her during the other seven days.  
Problem was, the compulsory exercise-ness that came with fucking Mels had me bored with her, too. I felt like I was punching the time clock every time I arrived at or left Mels' shiny 1000 square feet apartment. Also, her moans were overdone and so annoying that even her fantastic rack couldn't make up for it. The last straw that broke the camel's boner.  
But for Sarai's sake and my own, I kinda had to keep doing it – her – even though it made me… just _tired_ and ready to fucking go home.  
Which led me to Sarai herself. Now there was a bitch I could not wrap my head around.  
A week at Clearwood had done her good, even though there was still a long way to go until she might be considered 'healthy', especially in her head. When I had seen her last, on Saturday two weeks ago when she had properly come to the first time, she had looked at me with her dark blue eyes; she had been hurt and scared out of her mind.  
For all of two minutes.  
And then, she had run, and fought. Like a cornered feral animal, despite the pain – I could still see the crazy smear of blood on the beige linoleum floor when I closed my eyes – she had spat and yelled at me, not the least bit grateful for what I had done for her, which… well, that was her right, I supposed. She had missed the non-heroic rescue from a Nazi shithole bit and didn't know shit.  
Despite the confusion, and even when her strength had run out, her brain had still been in fight mode. I couldn't help but be impressed with that. I had expected her to be timid and broken, like Lilah and Maddie and _she herself_ had been when they first showed up at the compound, only worse. If she really was fourteen years old in her brain, as Dr. McGowan said, she had put on an Oscar-worthy performance six years ago as an _actual_ fourteen-year-old during her short stint at the Hangmen's compound. I remembered buying all that cowering and whimpering even when Prez and VP had not.  
There was exactly _nothing_ timid or weak about the bitch I had to physically pin down on the floor so she wouldn't hurt herself when she attacked me.  
She.  
Attacked.  
Me.  
Minutes after coming out of a drug haze and crying about everything hurting.  
With a piece of plastic that slipped out of her blood-soaked hands.  
Pretty sure my ancestors would have declared her a mighty warrior and started worshipping wet floor signs in her honor. Death Metal bands would be composing twelve-minute songs about her to this day. That was some serious valkyrie type shit right there.  
After years and years of abuse, this bitch had a will not made of cast-iron, but of fucking _diamond_. Judging by that sob and the 'kill me!' that echoed through my head, it was a little chipped around the edges, maybe, but certainly not broken.  
And I was gonna have to sit across from her, my willfull, sign-swinging not-wife, and talk with her. About what or to which end I had no idea, but Dr. McGowan would probably let me know in an hour or two.  
Twenty-three days spent in the dead end that was El Paso must have knocked a screw loose in my head because I was actually looking forward to it.  
"Dr. McGowan has logged a therapy session with you in attendance early tomorrow," Mels suddenly said from where she was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrestling her bra back on.  
 _Fucking mind-readers._ "Yeah," I said. I really didn't want to talk about any of it with Mels. Or maybe I just didn't want to talk with Mels, period.  
"You realize that this is really fucked-up? From _her_ perspective, I mean. She's going to a closed institution. McGowan is never gonna give her clearance for anything else as long as you keep up the fairy tales."  
She didn't need to remind me. I gritted my teeth and kept my comments to myself as I tied up my boots.  
"What really happened to the bitch, anyway? Diablos get her? I get she was one of those cult kids, like Styx' hot old lady, wasn't she?" She stood up to pull the seam of her shirt down and turned to me. "She yours, Vike? She _your_ cult cunt or something?" She crossed her arms, pushing her boobs almost under her chin.  
Fuck me, I hated jealous bitches. Especially when they got jealous mere minutes after they had gotten what they wanted, in two out of three holes. _Jealous and way too greedy.  
_ I grabbed both of her crossed upper arms with one hand so she couldn't move them, and roughly cupped her still-bare pussy with my other. "That be a problem?" I asked, getting in her face.  
She gasped and her eyes went wide. Her slit was still wet and quickly lubed up some more for round three she apparently hoped was coming.  
"N-No, Ahh." She lifted her chin as if defiant, then grinned a wicked, lustful smile that did nothing for me. "I just hope you spend a lot of time at Clearwood. There are several supply closets and vacant rooms I would… really… like… to show you. And my office. The door doesn't lock, you know, but that don't bother me…"  
Sexy, horny, kinky nurses used to be one of my favorite things. _Used_ to be. Now I immediately thought of a strategy to avoid having to fuck one at her workplace.  
Fuck my life.  
I let her go and went to wash my hands before I got out of her house. I needed a drink to get me through the talk with the doc, and the coming confrontation.

/

 _ **Sarai  
**_  
I was in limbo.  
My days and nights bled into one another. Only the changing pain levels marked the passing of days. They ebbed and flowed with the injections I was given and the pills I took and surgeries they performed: on my esophagus, on my uterus, on my appendix. I was asked to agree to those procedures and to sign my agreement on a dotted line. I did every time without reading through the small print because I saw no reason not to. I would survive all of them anyway. Natural sleep or drug-induced unconsciousness – it was all the same to me.  
Every day, the same faces: Young, pretty nurse Villanueva, old and cranky nurse Jiménez, almond-eyed therapist Lee, and tall, mild-voiced Dr. McGowan. Every day, the same questions, and the same answers from me, and the same evasions and silences and boring gazes from them. Every day, the same rhythms: Soft, bland food and warm water though I was neither hungry nor thirsty, light exercise on a mat in the middle of my room that left me sweating nonetheless, cleansing with too-soft towels and bowls of warm water, short but exhausting, painful and humiliating journeys to the small en-suite bathroom, sessions full of questions about a past I did not have – all these activities organized on time tables that meant nothing to me.  
I slept most of the time, maybe 17 hours every day, and spent 23 lying in bed. My energy levels were constantly low, and in sleep, my mind was not so agitated as it was during wakefulness.  
There were things I knew to be true: I was Sarai, I was 14 years old and I was the love of the one true Prophet Judah. I had lived and died and now lived again to repeat the last years of my life. In my mind, these things were pillars of stone that held me up.  
And against these pillars, waves of doubt continued to crash.  
Why was the face in the mirror so different, and the body I could look down upon so mature? Why did it carry the scars of the past life?  
Why had I not died and gone to the afterlife? Or _was_ this the afterlife?  
If so, why had Judah left me here? He was the right hand of God, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, he could pluck me out of this state of purgatory and lead me to his side – but each morning I woke up and he had not. Where was Judah? Did he still love me?  
Why was my fate not in Judah's hands, but in the hands of a man I did not know, whose motivations I had no hope of understanding, and who, even in constant absence, loomed over me like the darkness of the universe above the sky? Dr. McGowan frequently referenced him – his outlandish name, I had learnt, was Ulfr Sorensen – and his involvement in my 'curative treatment processes'. Was he truly the Devil, as I had perceived the first time I had laid eyes on him, keeping me locked away in limbo, apart from my love and the world?  
When would my life resume and put me on the road I had already travelled before?  
I remembered well what came directly after the hospital. It made me unsure whether I wanted to be freed from limbo or not, and that made me question my own behavior. Should I try to better accommodate Dr. McGowan, who was clearly the immediate person of authority? Anticipate her questions and attempt to answer to her satisfaction? Should I push through my lethargy and become more active? When she persuaded me to engage should I appear more responsive, ask more questions and show more eagerness? Fabricate a narrative that would please her?  
Or should I close myself off instead? Should I feign disinterest more pointedly? Withhold my appetite, go on hunger strike and refuse any further surgeries and the medicines? Or should I protest outright? Be more offensive and demanding? Try to escape once more, by force if necessary, to evade my 'husband' who would certainly be waiting for me at the door when and if I left?  
Escape – where to? I looked out through the slightly tinted windows of my room that were as locked as my door. The world outside was an endless-seeming stretch of tan and brown colors, flat and mostly barren, only dotted with a few thirsty-looking, spindly trees and small areas of pale-green grass. In the distance along the horizon, a mirage made the air seem like a rippling mirror, speaking of a heat I could not feel. Inside my comfortable prison, it was almost chilly.  
I was just lying down for a nap again to escape from the strange, directionless spin that was my life when the door opened. Nurse Lee came in, pushing an empty wheelchair, followed by Dr. McGowan.  
"Mrs Sorensen, how are you feeling today?" She greeted me with her usual placid smile and a warm, soft-palmed handshake.  
Accommodate and engage? Or draw back and rebuff? Eager or Reluctant? If I told her again that that was not my name and that she, if she had to talk to me at all, should please just call me 'Sarai', what would happen? After a too-long silence, I settled on a bland "good".  
"That's good," the doctor said, apparently pleased. "I would like to start a new chapter on our therapeutic sessions today. Are you feeling up to it?"  
I blinked. What did this mean? New, how? Feeling up to what? "I do not understand."  
"I would like to take a more extensive approach from now on. Incorporate more diverse types of therapy, see what helps you. For now, I would like to start with a guided conversation."  
Conversation? That was exactly what she had inflicted upon me these last two weeks, no? Or what passed as conversation to her mind anyway – long monologues about trauma, healing, the anatomy of memory and identity. I had rarely listened, sometimes nodded, in spite of the fact that almost nothing made sense to me.  
How was this to be different from before? What did 'guided' mean?  
"Let's go to the oasis together," Dr. McGowan said and turned to Nurse Lee.  
The oasis was the room where the 'therapy' usually took place. It was a large, bright space although the lights could also be dimmed, with a ceiling that could be opened to the sky, and a little waterfall gurgling in the corner that fed a small pool full of silvery-orange fish. Patches of floor felt squishy and warm. Sometimes, soft music played from hidden speakers.  
I had started to dislike that room. It was meant to comfort and to delight the senses, but its softness swallowed all of my burning questions right up and lulled me to sleep.  
Today, in the open space in the middle, there were two empty chairs. Nurse Lee pushed me toward them in my wheelchair until I faced one of them straight on. The other was to my left, a few feet further away.  
Doctor McGowan sat down on that latter chair and crossed her long legs.  
"Sarai, I have spoken at length with your husband and kept him informed in regards to your progress."  
All at once I knew who would be sitting in the chair across from me, and the air in the room seemed to drop onto me like a heavy blanket.

/

I did not watch him enter, but I felt it.  
His name was Ulfr Sorensen. He was not– _NOT!_ – my husband but everyone seemed to believe it. He was very tall and fearsome, bearded, long-haired. His eyes were blue and void of warmth. His voice was deep and his words were vulgar. That was all I knew about him.  
I did not know why he pretended to be my husband, or why he kept me here, or why he had told Dr. McGowan that he wanted to talk to me.  
We had been sitting in silence for long minutes. Neither of us spoke. The doctor was sitting next to us, looking at him and at me in turn. She had invited both of us to begin a conversation about any topic we wished.  
He was watching me. His gaze had a weight to it.  
I was looking at my left knee.  
I had dozens, _hundreds_ of questions, but did not feel I could reveal any of them. Moreover, I believed and trusted neither of these people. They had done nothing but lie, deceive and appease.  
Doctor McGowan finally decided to initiate. "I feel that it would be best to start with you, Mr Sorensen."  
My opposite cleared his throat but did not speak.  
"Let us imagine that this was simply the end of a normal period of separation of you both – for work, maybe, or because of traveling. You have just come home and met again for the first time in a long time. What would you say to her?"  
He did not answer for a long time. Then, he huffed. "I guess I'd ask her how she was doin'.  
If she'd missed me."  
For a short moment, I felt something tug at my heart. After this long period of separation, what would Judah say to me? I tried to imagine, but I could not. What would I say to him if we met again?  
 _When_ we met again?  
The man made a noise with his tongue and his teeth. "Yeah, this ain't gonna work. Sarai, you really have no idea who I am, yeah?"  
Deny? Confirm? I glanced at the doctor. She nodded encouragement. "This a safe space, Sarai. There are no right or wrong answers. Simply speak truthfully."  
I swallowed, then looked forward and shook my head at his boots.  
"Mr Sorensen, this is normal in some extreme cases. I encourage you to-"  
"We met at a commune near Austin," he said, ignoring the doctor's reassurances.  
 _That_ made me look up and at him, confused, shocked. So he knew about The Order? Was he telling the truth, then? Had we actually met at the commune and I had forgotten him? Had I misread him the entire time? Was he a man of God, after all? Had Judah sent him? Or was this all a ploy? I had told Doctor McGowan about The Order briefly. Had she relayed my words to him? My thoughts were a big, tangled ball of yarn.  
" I saw you the first time six years ago. You were still a snot-nosed teenager then. Thought you were _so_ clever." He smirked at me with his dead blue eyes which I could not read.  
"You were with Judah back then," he said, drawing the name out in disgust, and added under his breath, "That fucker."  
Dr. McGowan cleared her throat but said nothing.  
Hearing that name was like a punch against my ribs. Judah. _My prophet. My real husband. My love. How can you allow this smirking Satan to assume your place? How can you let him take your name into his unclean mouth?  
_ "He actually sent you my way that one time. You remember that? You met up with Mae, Lilah and Maddie, and they were staying at my place."  
I sucked in air but my lungs did not seem to fill.  
Mae, Lilah, Maddie? Salome, Delilah and Magdalena? They were the three Curseds, Satan's whores who had found refuge with – and underneath – the Devil's men, the members of a motorcycle gang that stood under the protection of Hades himself. I had gone to them, into their den of sin, and lured them out on Judah's orders so that the Prophecy might be fulfilled, only to have his twin brother Cain rebuke me and undo my work.  
 _They were staying at my place._  
A Devil's man. My husband – _not my husband!_ – was a Devil's man. One of the men who had stolen the prophesized wife of the Prophet, come to my home, ravaged the women, killed my brothers and sisters and stomped the commune into the ground.  
And now I was in this man's hands. His tainted blood ran in my veins.  
A sob broke free from my throat without warning, and I tried to hide it by turning to the doctor and requesting, "Please, would you give us a moment of privacy? I—I need to speak… intimately with… with him."  
Dr. McGowan assessed me with a glance from her brown eyes. "Are you certain, Sarai? You seem distressed and I would not want to-"  
"No, it's- I have… flashes of remembrance and I need to _know_. But they are… private. So, please- Just a few minutes."  
The doctor seemed opposed, but the man across from me also nodded at her and she finally got up. "I will be right outside in my office. I will rejoin you in five minutes. Please do not hesitate to call for me, should you need my presence." She pressed a small device into my cold, numb hands that had a button in the middle. I assumed I was supposed to push that button and she would come back.  
"Make it ten, doc," the man said, looking over at her and then back at me. I could feel his eyes on me. "We've got a lot to talk about."  
The doctor made some more reassuring noises, then finally left, shutting the door almost noiselessly behind her.  
Every cell in my body screamed at me to call her back. I could _not_ be alone in a room with this man. I suddenly felt the urgent need to use a bathroom.  
"Was I—Was I plunder?" The question burnt within me.  
I looked at him, but his face was completely blank.  
"'But you may take the women, dependents, animals, and whatever else is in the city—all its spoil—as plunder. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies.' Deuteronomy, 20:14. You and your pillaging gang of barbarians came to the commune and put my people to the sword. I remember it." As I said it, I heard bursts of sound in my head, like echoes through time. I remembered the chaos, fleeting moments of glory, and then death and nothing but pain, until there was nothing at all. "Did you take me with you? Is that how you became my husband? Did you claim me while I lay unconscious and then bring me here?"  
The man blew out a sigh and crossed his arms over his chest. The movement emphasized again his physical size and again I had to fight the rising urge to urinate. The small plastic device with the button creaked under the pressure of my clutching fingers.  
" _Pillaging gang of barbarians_ , huh," he drawled, pulling a face and nodding approvingly. "Not a bad slogan, all things considered. Good to see that we made a lasting impression. Anyway. I ain't your husband. Thought you had that worked out from the start – they're really not going easy with the drugs in this place, are they? Just to be clear, I'm still calling the shots when it comes to your stay here, so you might as well keep treating me as your hubby. You can call me Viking, or Vike, or asshole, or whatever you want."  
My head spun. Why- _What?_  
 _What?_  
"Secondly: When you say 'you came to the commune', it sounds like the big bad band of brutal barbarians invaded a poor helpless love-and-peace-and-bible-studies community for no good fucking reason. But might I remind you that your fucking commune was a cover-up for a pedophile ring and had teamed up with the KKK and the neo-Nazis to kill _us_ first? Just for the records, I mean. And all of _that_ shit was after they kept trying to steal our women away to rape them some more. _You_ might know something about that."  
His eyes were hard and cold with anger. I could not stand the feeling of them on me. I folded my hands in prayer, but not a single coherent thought came to my churning mind.  
"Thirdly: We didn't even massacre most of your commune. More than half of them were already dead when we got there. Courtesy of your precious Judah," he said, then casually added, "who we _did_ massacre that day, to be fair. His own brother, in fact, who went easy on him, the pussy. No worries, though. If there's a hell, an actual fire-and-brimstone torture chamber, then Judah is in there because that's where mass-murdering kiddie fucker shitheads go."  
"You _lie_." I did not know whence I took courage to speak to him so, but the words spilled from me along with angry tears that burned my eyes. _I will kill you! I swear on my faith,on my name, and on my Prophet!_ "My Judah is _not_ dead. You lie, deceiver! He is the one true Prophet of the Lord! The Prophecy spoke of him and stated clearly that he would bring the final-"  
"Which," he sighed, speaking easily over me and my agitated words, clearly annoyed at my outburst but waving it away easily, "brings me to fourthly: All this commune-Judah-prophecy-crap is actually six years ago. You seriously need to update your calendar."  
 _I am Sarai. I am 14 years old. I am the love of the one true Prophet Judah. I lived and died and now live again to repeat the last years of my life._  
"I know you're convinced that you died and reincarnated or something and that you're now fourteen again so that you were at the commune with your Prophet Fucknut just a month or so ago. But you didn't die, even though you apparently tried really hard to make that happen. In any case, no reincarnation for you. Or for your little commune of horrors. Or for your Prophet Pedo, before you ask. He's been rotting in the ground for six years now and if his fucking twin brother weren't one of my club's assets, I would have forgotten his ugly face a long fucking time ago." He paused for effect. "So anyway, time to get with the times. Every time you spew your _I'm really a teenager-_ bullshit, the doc deducts points from House Hufflepuff and makes plans to keep you here a day longer."  
" _You lie_ ," I repeated and my voice trembled with my burning certainty and with the pain of speaking. My throat was galled by every loud word I uttered. "Away, Satan! Go and spread your lies somewhere else!"  
"What did I tell you about taking orders, Sarai?" he asked, utterly unimpressed by my rage, one eyebrow lifted. "And about asking nicely? You remember that?"  
I did, but I refused to confirm it with words.  
"Good to see that your short-term memory is doing fine," he murmured as if to himself, clearly having taken my silence as admittance.  
"In any case," he continued, "you somehow dropped off the map for the six years after that day we wiped the commune from the face of the Earth, and I'm not really sure what happened to you during that time. Not really sure I really want to know, either, seeing that I found you three-quarters dead, tied naked and spread-eagled to a bed in the most pathetic Nazi base _ever_ a month ago. With a bag over your head and a bush full of crabs. Pretty sure the road leading to _that_ was the opposite of scenic."  
An onslaught of memories screeched through my head like thousands of nails on chalkboard. I fought them all down. None of them were real. They were from another life. They were irrelevant. _Inhale. Exhale. Do not vomit. It will only hurt your throat and tear open the surgery stitches._  
"Which brings us here. This, as you know, is where you'll stay. Period. Maybe in a few decades, some overworked, bleary-eyed doctor will squint at you and deem you fit to join the rest of humanity out in the real world, but I seriously doubt it. Most likely, they'll relocate you to a permanent asylum at some point, once you're healed up enough."  
"Why?" I asked. My head felt ready to cave in.  
"Because you're a freaking menace to society, and to yourself, sugarbun," he said, opening his hands as if to say 'This should be obvious; just look at yourself'. "You remember that you killed an unarmed woman in cold blood, right? Shot her point-blank. Hundred bucks says she wasn't your first or your last kill, either. You had three innocent women kidnapped to be raped and killed. Since you got here, you attacked half the staff one way or another, and you just keep. Going. On. With that fanatic Bible crap. They've got you on fucking horse tranquilizers 24/7 so that it's even possible to communicate with you like you're a sane person. Why do you think you're sleeping three quarters of the day?"  
I rubbed my eyes. As if on cue, my eyelids had become twice as heavy, yet my thoughts kept swirling.  
"No. Not that," I said, sluggishly groping for the words and putting them in order. "Why. Why did you bring me here?" Through all the swearwords and the scowling and the condescension, it was obvious that he thought he had helped me somehow – or at least that he thought he had done me some sort of service – and that I should be thankful to him. "I do not want to be here. I never asked for- I want to- Why did you… _save_ me?" I clarified even as the word tasted like bitter irony in my mouth.  
I already anticipated his answer. _There is only one reason why a man like him keeps a woman alive._ As though I could shield myself, I pressed my palms to my abdomen.  
For once, he was the one to lower his eyes and look away.  
I was certain now. _He_ was the one who kept me out of Judah's reach, out of Judah's arms. He had forestalled my fate and brought me to this dead end. He had already told me that I would never escape from this place.  
They would never let me die here.  
 _Inhale. Exhale. Do not vomit.  
Do not cry._  
Long moments passed in silence.  
" _Why?_ " I pressed.  
"Just made sense at the time," he answered and shrugged one shoulder.  
That was it?  
That was all he was going to give me for an answer?  
I wanted to scream at him and claw his eyes out.  
"Did you ever wonder what happened to your nose?" he suddenly asked, disrupting the boiling rise of my anger. My hand automatically flew up to my nose. I had noticed soreness there some time ago, and then, after the scabs had fallen off, noticed a small hole in the bone-and-cartilage wall that separated my nostrils down the middle. That wall also felt… unusually tender. Thinner, maybe. I had assumed it had to do with the breathing tubes that had often been strapped to my face. The doctor had talked about a 'perforated' and 'deviated' septum, but I had not been able to follow.  
"I'm guessing," Vike continued, "that some asshole in those six years somewhere got sick of you fighting him every inch of the way and put a ring through your nose. Like they do with bulls or dancing bears, to control them." He lifted his hand and set a crooked index finger against his nostrils in a pantomime.  
A picture from an illustrated Bible I had seen long ago came to mind: A huge ox being led to the slaughter to call the Israelites to arms. Its nose was pierced by a solid golden ring that looked as heavy and as large as a doorknocker. Two men were pulling the massive beast along with chains attached to the ring. Pink, frothy snot was dripping down the animal's muzzle.  
I shuddered. I was that ox, then?  
"When I found you, that shit was gangrenous. It was black and blue and red, real nasty shit. Someone tried to subdue you the meanest, lowest fucking way I can think of, short of putting that piercing through your clit. And they fucking _failed._ You almost ripped that thing out, that's how hard you fought them. The doc brought down the swelling with antibiotics, then cut the piercing off and reconstructed the septum you had torn and stretched to all hell." He blew out some air through his own nose. "I guess I reckoned someone with that kind of fighting spirit deserved a shot at a better death than dying of sepsis on a shit-covered Nazi bed."  
He got up from his chair with another huff of air and stepped away from me, scratching his beard. "Or something like that anyway. Fucked if I know. I do shit without thinking it through sometimes. Impulse control and all that. Runs in the family."  
A shot at a better death. Here? In this soft, beige purgatory, where I spent my hours numb, half in slumber, drained after merely lifting my chin? _At_ his _mercy?_  
As if he had heard my thoughts, the man who called himself Viking spoke again. "Once your body is healed up properly, and you tell the good doctor what she wants to hear, they will gradually lower your dosage. Make you more awake, up here." He gestured at his temple. "After a while, you'll be able to… do whatever the fuck you want, I suppose. Except leave, of course. Welcome to the Hotel California."  
"What the doctor wants to hear," I repeated dumbly.  
"I told you what's what, so you're on the right page now. Just go from there and make shit up. Tell her you remember me. How we met, shit like that. Fucking stop insisting that we're not married, and that you're with that asshole of a fake prophet, and that you're the chosen one or whatthefuckever, and that you're a fucking teenager. For all intents and purposes, we are married, Prophet Ju _dah_ is Prophet Ju _dead_ , you're not chosen for anything, and you're around twenty years old. Talk about the goddamn weather. Doesn't matter, just talk with her, she'll note it down as progress. Got that?"  
Before I could say another word, Dr. McGowan stepped back into the room. Her mild smile in place, she inquired politely in regards to the conversation that had just taken place between us. Viking – what kind of name was that, anyway? – answered her in the vaguest of terms, even when she addressed questions to me.  
I barely heard them. I was so tired, so exhausted. Sleep pulled me under and I found myself in my bed hours later when the sun had already gone down.  
I was Sarai.  
I felt a hundred years old, so weak and ill.  
Everything had happened to me. Every single minute of it. Nothing was undone.  
My beloved had forsaken me, my home was gone, and I was all alone.

/ **TBC**


	6. Chapter 5

_This is a short one. Sorry for that. Enjoy, regardless!_

 **Viking**

"They want to keep her at the hospital for the last three months straight, I think," Ash was saying. I could barely make out the words over the screech of a grinding machine. "Styx is all for it. Mae hates it and wants to go home. Bella's still away, Lilah's in quarantine at the cabin with Ky and the kids. So Madds is practically fused to Mae's side, which has Flame grumpy as fuck. As you can hear." Another violent screech of metal being cut by metal.  
I hummed agreement. Flame really hated hospitals, even benign-as-fuck maternity wards, especially after Madds had spent considerable amounts of time there during her own pregnancy with the twins. But he hated being apart from Madds even more. Something was bound to give. Right now, it was some metal part on a bike that probably deserved it.  
"You coming back, Vike? AK's losing it over here, with Flame all riled up, and Phebe knocked up, and all the kids."  
Life had gone on in my absence. Mae had suddenly started bleeding seven months into her third pregnancy – apparently it was all natural or whatever ( _women's bodies are so fucking weird_ ) – and Styx had, of course, lost his ever-loving mind. Maddie was supporting Mae, camping out at the hospital waiting room, much to Flame's dismay. Ky and Lilah's munchkins had all simultaneously caught the chicken pox – from the fifth kid the two of them were apparently in the process of adopting. Their entire brood and cabin were a biohazard until next week, to make sure Flame and Maddie's toddlers and especially newly pregnant Phebe didn't somehow catch the virus. Phebe had no intentions of slowing down at work despite the bun in her oven which was driving AK up the walls, who also had his hands full with Lillian and Isaiah while Madds and Flame were partially out of commission. Bella was busy finishing her last exams at the University of Houston. Ash, Letti and Beauty, along with Granpa Stephen, Mae's, Madds' and Bella's father, and Auntie Ruth, Rider's mother, were trying to hold down the fort for the young'uns while Smiler, Tank, Bull and Tanner had their hands full managing the club with half the cabinet gone.  
And I was hanging around El Paso for my daily dose of baleful glares and mandatory pussy.  
"Soon," I non-answered, frustrated. "Gotta go, kid. Hang in there, yeah?" I hung up before I said too much and sounded too eager to come home mere minutes after throwing him subtle-as-fuck hints about the fantastic nookie I was here for.  
I was just putting my phone away when door opened and a nurse pushed Sarai in her wheelchair into the room. The doctor followed after, as usual.  
I couldn't take my eyes off Sarai. Something had gradually been happening with her since that first 'conversation' six days ago. Not only was she continuously healing up, and her color was getting better day by day, and they were lowering the dosage of one of the meds that kept her so impassive and her brain so dull.  
It was clear by the look in her arctic-sea-colored eyes that she had picked herself up and braced. Why and for what or _how_ , I had no idea. She hadn't said another word to me in five meetings, just sat there and glared into my rough direction for fifteen minutes. I had no doubt she was killing me in hundreds of different ways in her mind the whole time.  
Pathetically, I was _still_ looking forward to those quarter hours. She was by and far the best company I had in El Paso. I couldn't help a little self-deprecating snort of laughter at that realization.  
Her glare immediately intensified. No doubt she thought I was laughing at her.  
Dr. McGowan did her doctorly preachy thing, as usual – I mostly tuned out because I only understood 70% of what she was saying either way; my Latin was a bit rusty – and finally left us for our allotted daily fifteen minutes of faux-marital rapprochement. As always, Sarai held a little pager device in her hand, a panic button she never set down, never stopped gripping like she was just waiting for me to lunge at her and wrestle it from her fingers.  
I looked around and spied a table in the corner that only held a modern art thing that might've been a vase or something. Without thinking about it, I got up, went to that table, set the vase-thing down on the floor and carried the lightweight piece of furniture toward our little sit-in. Kicking my empty chair to the side, I set the table in front of Sarai, then retrieved my chair and sat down again.  
"You ever play cards?" I asked, not actually expecting an answer, and pulled out a deck I had recently bought at a gas station. "Poker? FreeCell? No, let me guess… Solitaire. Solitaire it is." I quickly shuffled the pre-shuffled deck and started to lay out the cards for a round of Solitaire.  
She was watching. She was trying not to, but she was.  
"Did you know," I asked after a few minutes of playing, "that this game can be played by two people? Double Solitaire. I can teach you, if you want."  
She didn't react, but I taught her anyway, walking her through the rules and the objective of the game. Just in case she was listening.  
And I _knew_ that she was listening. That she was absorbing every single word I said, and even some I didn't. Just by the way she was looking at the world around her I knew that she was sharp underneath the drugs, as clever as she had been six years ago when she pulled the wool over the eyes of several grown-ups and successfully infiltrated what amounted to an armed bastion full of ruthless outlaw bikers, all on her lonesome. That must have taken balls and cunning, and I would bet good money that the six years in the meantime had not stripped her of either of those, no matter how tough those years had been. One of these days I would ask her where the fuck she got the gun that day she shot the pastor, and whether she'd had it on her the entire time, and how she had managed to communicate with her neo-Nazi contacts right under everyone's noses. From a purely technical standpoint, I couldn't help being sort-of impressed by how she had accomplished that mission. Also, the whole thing was _years_ ago –something water, something bridge. With the exception of some pastor I'd never met no one got hurt in the end, and The Order had got its just deserts and then some. And so had Sarai in particular, more than any of the assholes who had actually run The Order and fucked little kids, one of whom had been she herself. Hard to hold a proper grudge against Sarai under those circumstances.  
I won my round of cards without even having to cheat. I re-shuffled the deck with quick movements that always impressed the munchkins and a "And that's how it's fucking done, folks", and stuffed it back into my pocket.  
"Next time you play with me," I declared, carrying the table back to its original place and even putting the artsy thing back onto it. I made a mental note to buy a second deck of cards. "Fair warnings. One, I will probably wipe the floor with you. Not gonna baby you just cause you're new to the game. Them's the rules. And two, you'll have to put that thing outta your hands to hold the cards."  
I turned around to see her frowning at the plastic beeper as if it had offended her. I chuckled.  
"You can put it between your ass cheeks instead."  
That made her look up at me. She seemed vaguely horrified and confused, like she didn't know whether I was serious or not.  
"You know. Clench or flex in case of emergency." I winked at her and twisted my hips to turn my ass slightly towards her in illustration.  
Her expression became so dark that my chuckle became a full laugh. I lifted my hands.  
"It'll be fully functional and real fuckin' safe there. Just sayin'. Don't mind me."  
I looked at the clock that hung on the wall above the door. Two more minutes. The doc was never late. I would have to ask her to extend the fifteen minutes by at least five. Couldn't finish a game of two-man solitaire in fifteen minutes, especially not with a complete greenhorn.  
Said greenhorn was sitting and brooding in her wheelchair, panic button firmly in hand.  
Couldn't really fault her for not being my biggest fan, or for not being very trusting, or for wanting to murder me, but damn, we'd been doing this five days in a row now and she was doing her grumpy cat-meets-deer in headlights shtick still. Patience had never been my thing.  
"Look, you're a smart cookie," I sighed. "You must've figured out by now that I ain't your enemy here. If anything, we're both at the mercy of Doctor McGowan. Quicker you get back on track and convince the doc that you're gonna be a-okay, the faster we'll be outta each other's hair. And doc's gonna be convinced once you start behaving at least vaguely like normal people. Normal people talk to one another and fucking play cards every once in a while." I scratched my beard. "'least that's what they're tellin' me. Maybe I ain't really the authority on this topic. Anyway, if you keep this Harpo Marx bit up, you're not gettin' rid of me, and that's a promise."  
The doc entered the room to hear the latter half of the sentence and, by the look on her face, interpreted it as some sort of romantic declaration of perseverance. I wasn't gonna rob her of that notion but instead said my good-byes and got out of there.  
Turning the corner toward the exit, Mels came toward me. It was ridiculous how much it took to not turn on my heel and power-walk the other direction. If my brothers ever caught wind of me walking away from good pussy, I'd never hear the end of it.  
I fucked her in a closet, with her mouth stuffed full of medical scrubs to muffle her noises, and tried to puzzle out why the hell I was still here when El Paso and everyone in it was a fucking nightmare and I was needed at home. Was it some sunk cost effect bullshit? Was I trying to prove something? To whom and what? Had I developed a Sarai-focused savior complex? Was I subconsciously convinced that she needed me? That might've been the case the first two weeks, but now it was clearly bullcrap. That bitch didn't need anyone to survive, if she wanted to – and she clearly didn't _really_ want to, which no one except Prophet Turdcaptain had the power to change, and he was real fucking dead.  
As I walked out of Clearwood and onto the parking lot toward my bike, I gave myself an ultimatum. Tomorrow was Sunday. I was gonna get completely hammered tonight and I would take a well-deserved break from everything Clearwood-related.  
Then one more week and I'd be out of here, no matter what.

/

"Sarai has requested your meeting to be held in the south room from now on," the doctor told me on Monday at the end of her weekly pre-'conversation session' consultations. "I am not sure what brought this change on. She wouldn't tell me. Maybe she just does not like the Oasis. To be quite honest with you, Mr Sorensen, I was surprised that she continually consented to your one-on-one meetings at this stage. She doesn't seem very comfortable around you, which I would appropriate to…"  
I let the doc go on and on and just nodded and made some noises. She had the tendency to answer her own questions, which came in handy since I had no answers to give her. So apparently Sarai and I had hit a rough patch in our young marriage and the negative feelings had 'extrapolated themselves' into a general negativity towards me after her abduction trauma which resulted in 'immediate disassociation' from me and our relationship.  
Yeah, I mean, why the hell not?  
The south room turned out to be a small but airy room with wide, wrap-around windows, three white and one ocean-blue wall, some potted plants, a table and three chairs. One of the chairs was moved to the side to make space for Sarai in her wheelchair.  
I saw the table and couldn't help but smile. On it, very close to her edge, lay her panic button.  
I sat down after the doc had left us, and took the deck of cards out of my pocket, shuffled and dealt.  
She picked her hand up and played – badly. She still didn't say a word the entire twenty minutes, and the little beeper wasn't out of her reach for even a second.  
Still noted this down as a win.  
Baby steps.

/

 _ **Tanner**_

My stupid fucking phone wasn't saying a single fucking peep. I had been staring at it for so long, Adelita's avatar pic was seared into the backs of my eyeballs.  
It had been a long time since I'd wanted to kill someone just to let off steam. I didn't know yet if I wanted to kill _her_ , or her baby papi whoever the fuck he was, or her father, or my fucking self.  
Fucking _women_.  
After almost eight years, why was she doing this to me? Didn't she know by now that I was waiting – that I had been waiting all this time – for the click of her fingers?  
I looked at my last message to her again. _It changes nothing.  
_ She had received but not read it.  
I was fucking _dying_.  
There was a chime from my laptop that was set up in the corner of my office. I had two computers and two laptops up and running at any given time, to track down people and gather data. The one in the corner, I had used to have a look at the USB drives AK had handed me after coming back to Austin from the Hudspeth Nazi base a month or so ago. The drive had been encrypted. Had been. My software had just cracked it.  
I sat down and had a long look at the data. Arms deals, transaction receipts, bank data, recruitment lists, correspondence with a couple of people whose names rung several bells. "Interesting," I muttered to myself, annoyed at how well-connected Nazis still were, after years of corrupting their networks.  
A few minutes into clicking through the directory, I noticed a folder named 'MEAT'. I thought it was an acronym at first, but then I opened one of the video files in it, its file name a date that went back eight years and the letters ABI.  
The clip was only a minute and fifteen seconds long, but it felt a lot longer.  
Her name was Abigail. She had been nine years old when the video was taken, or so the tag superimposed over the video said. She was in her underwear, sitting wide-legged on some grown man's lap who kept tickling her sides and thighs and spreading her thighs open in a way that made my skin crawl.  
Sick to my stomach, I clicked on TAM to meet Tamara, also nine, bathing naked in a shallow pool; on NAT for Natalie, ten, being examined by a doctor while standing only in stripy pink panties; on BET for Bethany, eight, playing with a lawn sprinkler in a tiny bikini. The last one was designated SAR and was the longest clip with eight minutes twenty-four seconds. It was basically an audition, minus the black leather casting couch. Her name was Sarai, she was barely seven years old even though the make-up and hair made her look roughly 35, and the asshole behind the camera was audibly jerking off to her show.  
I recognized this shit. I had seen this back when I was still with my father. Future Nazi princesses, vetted for breeding purposes. It wasn't a coincidence that all these girls were bright white, blue-eyed, some shade of blonde, and very pretty. Breeding cattle. Meat.  
I got up and went outside to have a cigarette. I inhaled the smoke and held it in my lungs until it itched. When the cigarette was burnt all the way down to the butt, I took my phone and dialed my bitch's number – the one strictly reserved for emergencies – and spoke onto her mailbox. "I fucking love you. No matter what. Now fucking _call me_."  
Nothing like a bit of nauseating child porn to put things into perspective.  
Returning to my laptop, I found the video of seven year old Sarai frozen on my screen.  
Sarai. An unusual name. I had read it recently. But where?  
I went through the files on my other computer when it came to me. Viking had committed the girl he had found alive at the Nazi base to Clearwood under the name of 'Sarai Sorensen'.  
That probably meant that Trooper and Ash had found Abigail, Tamara, Natalie and Bethany in a shallow grave.  
How had Vike known Sarai's name, though? Had she been conscious at any point and told someone? Had she worn some identification? Had someone tagged or tattooed her?  
Reluctantly, I revisited the video.  
'Honored Elder.' 'Your Prophet'. This was cult-speak, I knew all about this. There were several people in the Hangmen MC who had been in the cult called 'The Order' long ago; brothers, old ladies, daughters.  
Had any of them told Vike about Sarai? Was that how he had known what to call her?  
I looked back at the video, freeze-framed onto a young face that was so heavily painted it seemed like a cartoon.  
Did _I_ know her? Had I met this girl?  
The longer I stared at her, the less certain I was. In fact, the longer I looked the less real she seemed. Some uncanny valley shit was happening with her make-up and the low video quality.  
Another short glance at my phone. No calls, no messages. I muttered a frustrated curse and got up, grabbing the laptop with the USB and the keys to my bike. I had nothing but time and this mystery would distract me from Adelita's stubborn radio silence.  
Time to pay an ex-prophet a visit and find some answers.

/ **TBC**


	7. Chapter 6

_Another short one. Sorry, again. Enjoy regardless! ****_

 _ **PART 3** **  
**_  
 _ **Sarai**_

It was Thursday.  
For the first time in years, I knew what day of the week it was, and with the knowledge came a sense of impending… something. I felt I was caught in a countdown but did not know how long the countdown was or what would happen when I arrived at zero.  
For the first time in years, I was also aware of the time. I felt seconds, minutes and hours passing even though there was no clock in my room, and I felt the daily approach of 2:30pm like the approach of a train while standing on the rails. Every day the train came, its turbulence whipped my hair around wildly and had me staggering on my feet, and then it left again. Yet I was never caught under its wheels.  
I was starting to hate the stale, unmoving air that seemed to surround and suffocate me from 2:50pm until 2:30 the next day.  
My heart beat deeply and steadily as Nurse Simmons pushed my chair into the south room. Doctor McGowan whose shoes click-clacked behind us had told me that we would focus more on physical strength next week if my surgery wounds kept mending at their rate so that I would be walking on my own again soon.  
Strangely, this felt like an accomplishment. More strangely, I wanted to speak about it with somebody. Anybody would do.  
Ulfr – Viking – was waiting for me already. He was standing with his back to the door and looking out the window. His hair was up in a bun today. In his back pocket I could already see the outline of the pack of cards that was becoming so familiar to me.  
When he turned around, I quickly averted my eyes, but the insufferable smirk in his voice as he spoke with Doctor McGowan told me that he had caught me looking and drawn the entirely wrong conclusions.  
I prayed he would not misinterpret my look for an invitation. Uneasily I wondered if I could maybe use the sharp-edged cards as weapons.  
I looked up just to see Nurse Simmons pull the door closed and give Viking a heated gaze that found no reply from its target, as far as I could see anyway.  
Oh. Now I understood.  
Without preamble, the man sat down, shuffled and laid out the cards according to the rules of Double Solitaire.  
Today, the silence seemed to itch my insides. Every minute that passed without a word from him felt like a precious resource recklessly wasted. Whatever it meant, my mind kept reminding me that _It was Thursday already_. _Already._  
Then, he inhaled and suddenly I was so afraid of the coming words that I burst out, "Thank you for the book!"  
I almost yelled. His eyebrows both jumped up in surprise, and so did my entire, unprepared body. I had been quiet or entirely silent for so long, the sound of my loud voice was a strangely visceral and thrilling experience. It made me cough immediately.  
"Huh," he grunted in reply. "Done."  
I did not know how to interpret that in this context.  
Then, he inhaled again and I quickly added a question that had been plaguing my mind. "Is the story finished? Is—Is there a sequel?"  
He did not answer for some time, then he said, "It's your turn", and nodded down at our game.  
I startled and quickly checked for possible moves. I had to force my mind onto the cards today. Truth be told, this particular game was not my forte anyway, and games in general were ungodly diversions from following the way of the Lord, really, so a part of my mind was constantly balking at it. But I figured that sacrifices had to be made if I wanted to proceed. Idleness and obstinacy were sins as well, after all.  
"Don't think there's a sequel," Vike eventually addressed my earlier question as I picked up a ten of diamonds and put it down again. "But I know that the dude has published some other books." He paused to make his own move with the cards and then said, "I can pick some up for you."  
I nodded at the implied question and breathed deeply.  
"You liked it, then." It was more a statement than a question. He shrugged one shoulder. "Never met anyone who didn't, really, so it's not surprising."  
It had been my first book that was not the Holy Bible. Since the book did not have any words in it but was entirely made of pictures, I had not felt that it was very sinful to read, or rather look at it. It depicted a story about a man who left his home and his wife and child behind and arrived via ship in an unknown land across the ocean where strange, fantastical creatures lived next to humans in a vast city. The whole book was pencil-drawn in hues of white, brown and gray, with much dedication to life-like detail. Some of its pages showed dozens of small pictures of clouds or different people's faces, while frightening vistas of black-tailed, fanged fiends prowling the streets and tumbling people into chaos stretched across two pages.  
"Got it for one of my nephew's birthday, several years ago," Viking continued. "His daddy's… not a big talker. The kid had a bit of a hard time with letters when he was younger. Plus, both of them are a bit on the darker side, so I figured they could look at that sort of book together. Since then it's made the rounds with all the kids. They all love it. Your turn."  
I moved a few cards.  
 _All the kids._  
"Do you have children of your own?" I heard the question before I was aware that I wanted to ask it.  
"Not that I know of," he replied. "Do you?"  
I was taken aback by that. Did he think I was a whore, to have offspring outside of wedlock?  
Then again, had I not just implied the same thing about him? Oh, but – were not his people, the Devil's men, proud of their whoring ways? Or maybe he suspected that I was married, even if not to him?  
"You're thinking pretty hard about a simple question over there, sugarbun," he interrupted, laying down several cards.  
I swallowed. "I do not," then added a clarifying, "have children," then, very quietly, finished with, "I think."  
Now that I had regained my sense of time, I was aware of all the time I had lost, literally. Time that had left no marks in my memory whatsoever, time spent in hazes of drugs and pain and feverish sickness. Six or seven _years_ , Viking had said. I might have easily incubated a child for nine months without ever knowing about it. There were no stretch marks and no scar on my belly, and the doctor had told me that there had been 'golfball-sized growths' lining my womb that would have prevented successful pregnancy, but that did not necessarily mean-  
"Your turn," he interrupted again.  
We played a few minutes in silence.  
"We're gonna play Uno tomorrow." He finished his foundations, thereby winning the game. "You suck at Solitaire, no offense. And I gotta nip this… budding friendship thing in the bud. No better way to do that than Uno," he said with a smirk that bared a silvery tooth in his upper jaw.  
I did not understand his meaning, so I merely nodded. He sighed.  
He got up and slid the pack of cards into his pocket again. When he went for the door and pulled it open, he revealed Nurse Simmons.  
"Oh, fantastic timing!" she gushed and slipped into the room, her greedy eyes glued to Viking. "I was just about to get Sarai back to her room. We're gonna have a bath in a moment," she said to me. "It's your first real bath since you came here. Are you excited!?" Her voice was pitched high and unnecessarily loud, as if she were talking to a child, or an old dog that was hard of hearing. Also, when she said 'we', she did not mean herself and me but referred to other people, and 'in a moment' could be anywhere between five minutes and two hours.  
Despite the lack of a clock, I was certain that my twenty minutes with Vike were being cut short, and that made me strangely jittery inside. I turned around toward him as Nurse Simmons pushed me and my chair onto the corridor.  
"This—This 'Uno' game…" I began as I caught his eye. "Does it take twenty minutes? I mean… Could it be longer?"  
"Definitely longer," he confirmed and grinned. "Everything's longer with me, sugarbun."  
Nurse Simmons gave the wheelchair a jerky push to pass over the bump of the doorsill. We were halfway down the corridor before I made sense of his words, and gasped soundlessly.  
The Devil's men certainly were salacious.  
When I lay in the bath some time later, immersed in the sweet-smelling luke-warm water for the first time in… maybe months or _years_ , I looked down on myself. It made me think.  
Viking was lewd, but merely with his eyes and sometimes with his words, but not with his hands. I had been anticipating his hands and other parts of his body to take advantage of our privacy at some point. When he had not, I had reasoned that my aspect must have been disagreeable to him, and I had been relieved – for a short time, at least, until I realized how rapidly I was healing.  
Now that I was looking down on myself, however, I could not say that I found my body particularly displeasing even at this stage of my recuperation. A little too thin, a little ravaged by illness and lumpy from inactivity, a little sickly in color, maybe, but not repugnant. Certainly, I had looked much worse before and it had never stopped any man.  
What was he waiting for?  
What was _I_ waiting for?  
I was certain my shape was not objectionable.  
Or was it?  
Did I _want_ it to be?  
I let myself sink into the swallow water. It was not enough to cover my face, but I enjoyed the sensation of it flooding my ear canals.  
This was all so confusing. I had no hope of understanding this life and my place in it at all.

/

 _ **Viking**_

She _killed_ me. At Uno, at least.  
It was my turn to glare at her when I drew four additional cards _again_. "You sure you ain't cheatin'?" I squinted at her over the abundance of cards on my hand and got a completely blank face in return.  
Note to self: Never show this bitch how to play poker, or at least never play against her.  
Clever _and_ cunning and a pa-pa-pa-poker face that would make Lady Gaga orgasm on stage.  
"You met Doctor Gonzales this morning?" I asked. Doctor McGowan had told me very little about this. Apparently, I had rubber-stamped all types of therapy and Clearwood would now throw all of it at Sarai whenever the personnel was in attendance and see what stuck. Something something extensive personalized therapy plan. It was good to be filthy rich.  
Sarai nodded a yes to my question.  
"And how did that go?" In mounting desperation, I threw down a reverse to force her to skip her move and added one measly card to the pile. She wrinkled her forehead and drew a card.  
"Doctor Gonzales is a… very small man," she said carefully and nothing else.  
I tried real hard not to roll my eyes. This was like asking Charon what had happened and why Jake's lip was busted and bleeding. Those kids lived by the first and second rule of the Fight Club, and it was a pain in my ass, especially when I was the babysitter who would have to report to Styx and Ky.  
"You wanna tell me more, or is it a secret?" I demanded, a little less than friendly.  
She, in turn, tried really hard not to flinch. A few weeks ago, this reaction would've left me cold. I was used to people – grown men – flinching when I opened my mouth.  
(Okay, sometimes it was more of a cringe than a flinch, but _very_ rarely.)  
Now, from _her_ , though, it kinda irked me. It was difficult going on impossible to be non-threatening when you were more than six feet tall and 270 pounds. I had made a fucking effort to be at my best behavior all week, what with her being traumatized and confused even though she didn't show it the way normal bitches would. Talking about the books I had bought and playing cards had seemed to help some. There had seemed to be some progress.  
'Seemed' being the operative word.  
 _Think positive. Her urge to kill you apparently disappeared for the time being. Silver linings.  
_ "He… Doctor Gonzales is about this tall," she restarted, holding up a hand to maybe 4 feet 5, "and his voice is very soft. I—uhm. I thought he was just a boy."  
I had no idea why she was so insistent about this point. Was he just the first little dude she'd ever met?  
"Interesting," I said, very aware of how sarcastic that sounded. "And what did you guys talk about?"  
"Writing," she said, "and music."  
Oh, right. Doctor McGowan had mentioned something like this. "And…?" I prompted.  
"Only those two topics," she said and put down yet _another_ draw four-card, cool as a cucumber.  
I rubbed my forehead. Alright, change of strategy. Smaller steps. "So you listened to music?"  
"No." She shook her head.  
"Why not?"  
"Because music is ungodly," she said.  
I eyed her straight face. She was serious as a heart attack. I doubted she even knew what sarcasm and jokes were. Life without music, though… good fucking grief. Also, a statement like that must've earned her several demerits on her loon-o-meter.  
"Remind me to introduce you to 'Stairway to Heaven' sometime, sugarbun. It might change your mind," I told her, drawing my four new cards with long-suffering sighs. "So, no music. Did you talk about writing, then?" I threw down a card.  
"Yes." She nodded.  
"Writing's not _ungodly_?"  
A pause that seriously had me sweating a little, then: "No." She threw down a card.  
"Thank fuck," I mumbled. "What're you talking about, then? Poems and shit?" I guessed. I had no idea whether limericks or haikus could help with trauma. Personally, I found hit lists very therapeutic but Clearwood didn't seem like the type of institution.  
"Maybe," she said but nodded again.  
"Short stories?" I flicked a card at the pile.  
Another nod, then a head-tilt. Whatever the fuck _that_ meant.  
"Cooking recipes?"  
She froze mid-card draw and thought about it hard. That made me smile for no good reason. She was so up in her brain, it was almost too easy to take the piss.  
"Which of you is doing the writing?" I asked before her head imploded from thinking too hard.  
"I am," she said and ducked her head oddly.  
"And what have you written so far?" I kept going.  
"A letter," she admitted.  
"To who?" I asked, now seriously curious.  
She glanced at me, then down again. "To whom," she said, very quietly.  
"Never heard of him," I said with a straight face.  
She pressed her lips together firmly and studied her cards like the meaning of life was written in them.  
"Let me guess. Laughing is ungodly, too?" I pulled a face.  
"At lame jokes, yes," she replied, then laid down three cards – skip, reverse, and a draw two.  
"Uno," she said.  
Whiplash. This bitch was giving me whiplash. I literally blinked at her in wonder for a second and had to shake myself out of it.  
"Apparently she _does_ know what sarcasm is, after all," I muttered as if to myself, "and it's not ungodly, either." And to her, I said, "I want a fucking rematch, and after that, we're gonna start playing fucking domino. Whoever had the stupid fucking idea to play Uno, anyway?"  
The twenty-five minutes were over before I could even blink.  
When one of the nurses pushed Sarai out of the room, she looked back at me over her shoulder until she was out of sight.  
"One more day and you're done here," I reminded myself. "One more day." 

/ **TBC**


	8. Chapter 7

_This is chapter 7 already! Enjoy!_

 **Tanner**

I noticed that he let his phone ring once, twice, three, four times before he answered.  
"Yeah."  
He knew it was me, my number was saved to his device, but just to annoy him, I greeted, "Hey, Vike. It's Tanner."  
"I know." I could basically hear his eyes rolling. "Fuck you want, Magda?"  
I should never have let him read up on women in Nazi Germany. He'd been nicknaming me 'Magda Goebbels' for months now.  
"Congratulate you," I replied, ignoring the jibe.  
A pause. The roar of an engine coming to life. "'s not my birthday. Not even close. The fuck are you on?"  
"No, I know. But you dickhead got yourself a wife, all stealthy-like, and didn't tell anyone. Wasn't even a fucking stag party. I must say, I am disappointed. Why you hidin' her away, Vike? She ugly as an old hooker on meth?"  
"Fuck off, Tanner," he growled into the phone, not even bothering to deny it. He must have figured that I had known about his paper marriage for Clearwood purposes for three weeks already and hadn't bothered to get up his ass about it until now. "Unless you wanna start being relevant, I'm gonna hang up. I've got shit to do."  
"No, I know that, too. Extensive multi-approach therapy under the supervision of one Dr. Paige McGowan, for purposes of rehabilitating your beloved Sarai. Two thirty p.m. on the dot, just like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and every single day the entire last week, too." I clicked through the hospital records that dear doc McGowan was unwisely keeping in her cloud. "And your sessions keep getting longer and longer. Can't get enough of each other, huh?"  
Silence again. "We got a problem here?" He was getting real angry. Good.  
" _You_ 're the one holding hands at 'conversation therapy' with the fake wife you haven't told anyone about, Vike," I drawled. "You tell me."  
"This ain't none of-"  
"-my business? _The club_ 's my business, and the wife we're talking about here infiltrated the club at the tender age of 14, had three brothers' old ladies kidnapped by neos and delivered to a bunch of doomsday cult pedophile rapists," I enumerated.  
Vike didn't answer, so I just assumed he was paying attention and continued.  
"You knew who she was the minute you saw her in that Nazi base. Kept it hush-hush so Styx and Ky wouldn't ride into El Paso to cut their pounds of flesh outta her for what she did to their bitches, if anything was left of her to cut, anyway, seeing that both Flame and AK were with you in Hudspeth that night. You even made the whole bit about Mels up so you'd have a front for hanging around Clearwood and no one would come check in on you."  
Several seconds ticked by. I thought I could hear Vike's molars grinding through the phone, or maybe it was just static. Suddenly, the engine cut off. "You have a point?" Vike asked into the sudden silence, and I was kinda glad that he was 600 miles away right now. So glad that I actually laughed.  
"You constantly give me shit about _my_ bitch and doubt my commitment to the Hangmen when it comes to her. Consider the fucking tables turned for once, Vike," I said. "You clandestinely spend more time with your snake of a non-wife than the average American man spends with his actual wife, man. Not to mention the fifteen hundred a night you… no, _the fucking club_ is spending just for the bed she's lying in."  
"Your. Point."  
As I had expected. Stubborn asshole. Alright. He had it coming. I inhaled to steel myself and began reading out loud.  
"'Prophet Cain – I later learned that it was his twin brother, Judah – had a consort, a favorite. Her visits were as feared among the girls at the house as those of the elders, as anticipated as the sharings. Sarai was her name and she was older than me by maybe 4 years. She was entirely, fanatically devoted to the commune and to the Holy Scripture. She liked to hold us down by our hair and insert objects into our bodies – our vaginas and anuses – while quoting scripture at us and criticizing our demeanor. On me, she used her fingers and her whole hand, a toilet brush and raw chicken eggs-'"  
" _W_ _hat the fuck, Tanner_?!"  
"I am looking at transcripts from therapy sessions and eye-witness reports that feature your dear wifey's name. Terrific read, if you want to get real, real angry at the world. Wanna get to know your significant other a little better? I can send them to your inbox." I asked, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. Tabitha's testimony wasn't even the worst of the lot.  
"Whose fucking reports are those!?"  
"Before the Hangmen went to war with the commune and the cultists drank their kool-aid, Prophet Fuckknuckles had already shipped out several handfuls of pre-teen girls from his cult to pedo cartels and other flesh-trading assholes. Couple of those girls turned up again over the years – got rescued or managed to escape or whatever – and entered the healthcare system. Joined little self-help groups for cult survivors that publish accounts. Wrote books and blogs about their lives. Talked to many shrinks about their traumatic experiences. Turns out, dear Sarai was one of those experiences."  
A rustle of static on the line told me that Vike had heaved a sigh.  
"Do I need to talk to the Prez about your dirty, psychotic little secret?" I asked him straight. "You gonna hang around her and stay away from the club for much longer? Cut some more important meetings with other chapters' Prezzes short to get to her and tap into the club's funds to pay for her 'aqua therapy'? You losing sight of your priorities?"  
"You fucking _know_ I am not," Vike growled. "And if you go to the Prez with this-"  
"The cunt you're fraternizing with is basically a teenage Bellatrix Lestrange, man," I snapped back. "Murderous, fanatic, completely brainwashed. _She fucked little girls_ , Vike. With toilet brushes. There's no goddamn excuse, and no goddamn treatment either, except maybe a fucking brick to the head. What the fuck are you trying to accomplish, hanging around doing fucking _therapy_ with that?"  
Silence.  
"You letting her get to you, Vike?"  
He didn't have an answer because of course he didn't. My guess was that he had no fucking idea what he was doing. God fucking damn this stubborn Nordic dickhead.  
"Has it occurred to you that she might've been at the Nazi base of her own accord?"  
"SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, TANNER!"  
I hadn't expected that outburst. My ear started to ring.  
"Shut your stupid, ignorant mouth," Vike repeated, volume lowered but no less furious, "and _keep_ it shut. Here's what you do. You're gonna send those reports to me and whatever else you have found on Sarai, and then you're gonna delete that shit from your server and forget you've ever seen it."  
"Vike-"  
" _Now_ , Tanner. " He restarted the engine of his bike. "And if you breathe a single word of this to the Prez or anyone else, I swear I'll make you regret it. Don't fucking test me."  
I had never heard him _that_ serious. This was worse than I had thought. "Fuck me," I murmured to myself. Time to row back. "Vike. Fuck. Just fucking tell me you're not getting serious with the psychopath."  
"Send me the stuff," Vike commanded and ended the call.  
I stared at the screen from which the chilling testimony of 'Tabitha, age 15' was still staring at me, right next to the freeze frame showing young Sarai's heavily made-up face, but I wasn't seeing the words or the visage any more.  
Fucking _women_. Nothing but trouble.

 _ **/**_

 _ **Sarai**_

Something was different. I could tell the second I crossed the threshold on Saturday, 2:30pm.  
This was what the countdown had been leading to. This was zero.  
Surprisingly, I was not afraid. At least not overly so. Instead, I felt sadness. I had been looking forward to Viking's little questions, and to talking about the new wordless book I had received yesterday (and already 'read' three times since then), and to learning how to play a game called 'domino'. And the letter I had written to him would now stay in my wheelchair's side pocket.  
Today, it was Doctor Gonzales who accompanied me to the south room since Doctor McGowan was away for a conference until next Wednesday. The height difference between him and Viking was tremendous and it would have made me laugh, had I not felt the cold breeze of the countdown on the back of my neck.  
The doctor and Viking talked for a short while – about me, as if I was not in the room. I folded my hands and kept my mouth shut.  
"'cause there won't be any visitation tomorrow, Dr McGowan, Sarai and I had arranged for this meeting to be twice as long, actually," Viking lied into the shorter man's face.  
"Oh?" Dr Gonzales seemed stunned and pulled out a slim black device from his white coat's right pocket and consulted it. "Dr McGowan has not noted this down in her-"  
"If it's a problem, I can—I mean, if your schedule…" Vike offered a vague compromise, then doubled down, "I just wanted to spend some time with my wife, doc. We've got dominoes on the agenda today," and gave the doctor a wistful sort of smile.  
Viking was a deceiver, after all, and a good one. His masks were entirely convincing. Doctor Gonzales did not stand a chance against this fraudulent show of humility and honest desperation.  
He turned to me. "Mrs Sorensen, are you agreed with this?"  
I did not dare to look at Viking. I nodded and swallowed down the sadness that sat in my throat like a stone.  
Forty minutes… precious… wasted. An ache bloomed in my chest.  
The doctor left us and I did not even notice that I did not have the little black plastic device until after the door was closed. In the past five days, I had forgotten about its perpetual presence on my table. Now, I missed it like I would miss a hand.  
For once, I knew exactly what to pray for.  
It took Viking long minutes to start talking, and when he did, his voice was that of a stranger.  
"Sarai, do you know what I am?"  
'What' he was? A man? The most unusual, unexpected, confusing man I had ever known? My jailer? My savior? My future violator? The question was what he was _not_ to me, at this point. I shook my head. "I-"  
He was not patient today. "I am a fucking biker. That's what I am. And not a casual one, either. I'm the Secretary of the Hades Hangmen MC, the biggest, meanest club in the States. We have dozens of chapters, thousands of members and associates and we make our own fucking rules, big fucking money, and lots of fucking enemies."  
I could only listen. The aggressive pride in his voice made me shiver.  
"Look at me," he said and opened his hands as if to invite my gaze. I could see the gesture from beneath my lashes. "I'm tall and built as fuck. I could make a fortune on fucking Instagram these days, selling protein powder to those crossfitting pussies and making a mint in steroids and legal custom guns on the side. Instead, I'm running with a gang of criminals. Why do you think that is?"  
Again, I could only shake my head.  
"I like to kill people," he eventually said.  
I met his eyes then, and for a split second, I could see Judah's light in them. The same light that had shone from my Judah when speaking about the End of Days, the Apocalypse, his rule on Earth, and Heaven.  
"The messier, the louder, the better," Vike continued, matter-of-fact. "Always been that way. Started when I was 11 years old. Tortured my mother and roasted her alive. Blamed it on my sister and got away with it. Found an MC, joined, never looked back, will stay there for life. Why? 'cause people like me don't have a place in the normal world. We don't belong there no more. We're monsters. We stay the fuck away from people. And we know all about one another. All there is to know. I know all fucking kinds of monsters."  
I thought of his words from two weeks ago, about how they – the doctors – would never let me out of this place. That I would live forever in an asylum, apart from the 'real world'.  
"I know the monsters that torture and kill random assholes and other monsters. I know the _special_ kind of monsters that torture and kill their own mom. I know plenty of torturers and murderers, drug dealers, weapons traders, congressmen. Some of those fuckers I call friends. But," and he paused again, to hold on to his composure this time, "it takes _a really fucked-up_ monster to rape little girls. That shit doesn't compute, even for me. I normally don't get to judge, but there are fucking _lines_ that _nobody_ gets to cross. Ever."  
I tried and failed to puzzle out his meaning, and why he was so bitterly angry at me.  
Or was he angry at himself?  
A slapping sound made me jump. I looked up to see a stack of papers on the table in front of me.  
"Read," Viking said, "and don't you _dare_ skip a page." He walked toward the windows on the far side of the room, crossed his arms over his chest and looked out. Turning his back to me.  
I hesitatingly reached for the papers, and I read.  
I could not make heads or tails of it at first. It was a medical protocol of some sort about a patient called Naomi, peppered with many technical terms I did not understand.  
Then, Naomi's recount an incident of her childhood appeared on the next page, and finally something made sense to me. Her childhood was the same as mine. She had been at the commune. She had been born there and grown up there, met the same people there. She and I, we were the same. I did not recognize her name, but I felt that I had met her.  
I turned the page and found that I had, in reality, met her. That I, Sarai, had been there, too. She described me and recalled my name. She mentioned it several times. She told many things about me and what I had done, things she recalled in detail.  
I turned the pages again, and again. The report went on and on, until it was replaced by a new report.  
I did not remember Chloe, either. Nor Hannah. Nor Zemira. Nor Tabitha. I remembered none of them by name but they remembered me and what I had done.  
I laid the papers back onto the table and waited.  
Viking eventually spoke, not to me but to himself, with a sigh and barely contained frustration. "And she's fucking got _nothing_ to say."  
I realized that 'she' was I, and that I, indeed, did not know what he wanted to hear from me.  
"I- I do not understand why you showed me this," I admitted even as I knew that it was the wrong thing to say. "I do not recall these women's names, though I do remember these-"  
" _Girls_ ," Vike interrupted, turning around and coming towards me, leaning on the table in front of me with his massive arms. His voice boomed through me. "They were little girls, Sarai! Eight, nine, ten years old! And _you fucking abused and raped them_!"  
His words were like a slap to the face, even if I did not comprehend them. I did not understand why he was so utterly disgusted with me. I did not understand the words 'abuse' and 'rape' in this context.  
"I knew you were a vicious little cunt from the beginning," he growled at me. "I remembered your act at the compound, how you exploited Mae's and Lilah's and Maddie's soft hearts and then delivered them into the hands of rapists, how you killed an unarmed woman. But this-" He stabbed a finger at the printed reports. "This is _evil_. Straight-up burn-in-hell shit that doesn't even fly for monsters like the Hangmen." He seemed to search my face, his own expression stormy. "Do you even get what you've done to them, Sarai?"  
 _To_ them?  
What I had done _to_ them?  
"What I have done _for_ them," I corrected with a trembling voice, "is what I wished someone would have done for _me_ when I was their age."

/ **TBC**


	9. Chapter 8

_**Sarai**_

Viking looked at me like I had just slapped him back. Like I suddenly did not speak his language anymore.  
It reminded me that he was an unbeliever. Judah had always said that unbelievers lacked the capacity to understand us and our way of life. Their minds were dulled to the voice of God and the voice of reason. They had imposed a false order on their lives, based on a misconceived perception of the world. Their hearts were willfully illiterate.  
Still, I was overcome with the need to explain to this particular unbeliever, to make him see my reasoning. To make the loathing and revulsion flee from his face, so that we might go back to playing cards again.  
"I was shown my place in the commune by brothers and elders after my awakening, but none of them ever explained what they expected of me, before or after. Their practical approach to teaching was often confusing to me, contradictory even, because my body and my mind were frequently at war with one another at the time of a joining in the first few years. It is, of course, not the brother's or the elder's duty to make allowance for this needless and unreasonable internal strife during a joining. Their objective is to reach spiritual elevation and to cleanse the vessel through divine will with their essence."  
"'Awakening'?'Teaching _'_? 'Joining'? What the fuck are you even talking about?" He did not understand my meaning.  
Of course he did not. Judah had been right.  
"By joining with a woman, a man can become closer to God. It is a woman's holy duty and privilege to be the vessel for him. It is not her place to fight him and to complain about bodily discomfort. It will diminish the divine experience. It is not her place to deny him or to distract him with her complaints. It is shameful misbehavior."  
I remembered these words from my mother. After two years of unsuccessful teaching, Brother Luke had finally consulted with her in regards to my dissatisfying comportment. My enduring obstinacy had led him and the other elders to the assumption that I might be a cursed woman of Eve.  
Then, my mother had instructed me.  
After that, my life had changed for the better, and I had mourned the two years that had been wasted. Two years my mother should not have hesitated.  
Viking looked at me with his mouth slightly open and his eyes narrowed, disgust and confusion warring for supremacy over his face.  
I needed to hurry and finish my explanation. His patience would not last.  
I held my hands out over the reports before me, noticing that my fingers were trembling and my palms were wet with perspiration.  
"These young women… They were so fearful all the time, cowering, sniffling and sullen. I couldn't understand how they didn't see that their obvious weakness frustrated the brothers, that it made the joinings less than they could be. Their behavior… it _polluted_ the commune. So I pushed them. I _instructed_ them, to prepare them for the men and to ease the joinings, and I led them by example. I wanted them to stand up taller and assert themselves and embrace their role in the community."  
Viking took in my words. He sat down, very slowly, on his chair. "So… you think… you did them a favor?" he asked. His question dripped with revulsion.  
"They had to learn!" I cried out. Why did he not understand? "When the brothers and the elders joined with them, my sisters disturbed them with their ceaseless crying and screaming no matter how often the men admonished them. No one else would instruct them, no one else was there to correct their detrimental mindsets! The men had never explained anything to them. Their mothers had been soft on them." That was the root of their misery. It had been the root of mine, to start with.  
"They, just like I, were precious!" I reminded Vike. "Yet they thought of themselves as dirt, they comported themselves that way, and thus the brothers treated them as such. It made me so furious! Their pathetic whimpering..."  
As I said it, the sound rose in my memory. It did not cease, no matter how hard I shook my head. They sniffled and spoke about wanting to go 'home', wanting their mothers and their fathers, their brothers and sisters, even their pets, anything or anyone to comfort them. They constantly whined about the pain though they barely even bled.  
The old anger at them suddenly made me breathless. I clawed at my chest through the thin papery hospital gown I had been wearing constantly ever since I had arrived here.  
" _I_ did not whimper!" It had been a hard lesson to learn – that had been all my fault, all my fault – but I had learnt it. "So why did _they_? What did _they_ have to cry about? Why could they not simply... rejoice? They... They were never thought to be cursed, after all!? Instead, they were cherished vessels of spiritual elevation, the most important part of the community. They had a teacher in me, someone to answer the questions they were too fearful and too embarrassed to ask! So...why the whimpering? So useless!"  
I found that my heart was pounding madly in my chest. Why was I so agitated by this?  
"Why are you crying?" Vike asked, catching me by surprise.  
I reached up to find my cheeks wet and tears dripping off my chin.  
"They are happy tears," I said hastily, because what else could they be? I roughly wiped them away with my palms. "Tears of remembrance and nostalgia. I miss those days, and my mother. I had a place and a purpose. Life was good."  
He eyed me steadily, then sighed and shook his head slightly. "Yeah, you're so full o' shit," he said. "But it's not all your fault, is it."  
His words made me angry at him. First he did not believe me, then he belittled me. "What do you know?!" I snapped, hating that I hiccupped with tears.  
"You were 'instructed', right?" he asked. There was a dangerous calm in his voice. "I'm bettin' your mother was your instructor. She raped you like you raped those other girls, to prepare you for the men, didn't she?"  
"No-"  
"She teach you not to cry and scream when they fucked you?" he interrupted, more angry now. "To act like a proper hooker for them? Make them think you fucking like it? Or did she just fuck you so hard with whatever fucking item was at hand that the men didn't seem all that scary to you anymore?"  
I did not understand why he kept using the word 'rape'. 'Rape' was when a man joined with a godly woman outside of wedlock or sharings, when he had intercourse with her for purely selfish purposes and thus displeased God. I shook the nonsensical questions away.  
"My mo-" My breath hitched as a pain stabbed through my chest. _It means I miss her._ I had not seen her since the day Judah chose me to stand by his side. I wondered if she had perished in the Devil's men's ambush, or whether she had chosen to join the ancestors before. In my heart, I felt that she was not among the living any more.  
"My mother loved me more than she loved life herself. She wanted Heaven for me!" I touched my forehead in the same spot where a fierce, stabbing ache was blossoming. It was always like this when I cried. It reminded me to not cry again.  
Vike looked at me for a long time in silence, then moved to pull a sleek black device from his pocket, much like the one Doctor Gonzales had used. He fiddled with it for a second and then turned the screen toward me.  
Moments later a small, grainy video started playing. At first, there were only blurred colors and squares, then a large painted canvas came into view: A bright blue sky dotted with clouds over a meadow with flowers, propped up against a dirty-looking wall. It looked washed-out and horribly cheap. The whole video was of poor quality.  
Through the phone's small speakers came a male voice. His words were unintelligible. The camera zoomed in then out again, moved a little up and down before the picture became steady again. Then two people stepped into view from the right.  
"Do you remember that?" Vike asked.  
I could not answer. I stared.

Two females. One was older, maybe thirty years of age, dressed in a gray gown, her fair hair covered by a proper headdress. The other was a little girl, seven years old, in a flimsy, short-sleeved white dress, with flower garlands in her waist-long, dark blond hair. On her feet were high-heeled white patent leather shoes which twinkled and gleamed in the light from the spotlights that were turned her way.  
The shoes had been too high and they had pinched her toes and heels. She had had blisters afterwards.  
"Go ahead now, my princess. You remember what I told you, yes? What we practiced?" The woman could be heard saying as she moved out of the camera's view.  
The girl nodded her little head dutifully.  
"Be a good girl now," the woman said.  
The girl was left standing there against the kitschy, fake-looking background. She looked into the camera then and her gaze went through the lens, through the phone's small screen, through _me_. Her blue eyes seemed unnaturally large. Her eyelashes were lengthened and thickened artificially, her eyelids painted a smoky grey-and-black that reached up to her plucked and modeled eyebrows and faded out to her temples. The apples of her cheeks glittered a little with a facial lotion her mother had told her to apply. Her lips, apparently blown up to twice their normal size and made to look constantly puckered in a kiss, were red and shiny, like a fresh, wet cherry, or like blood.  
She was breathtakingly beautiful. A perfect little doll.  
I remembered that girl. She had thought she was so ready, and that she looked perfect and beautiful and was about to embark on the one journey that mattered in her whole life.  
Now that I looked at her and she looked at me, she was merely young. Naïve. Pathetic. Cheap like the canvas background behind her.  
And afraid.  
"What is your name, child?" a man's voice asked from behind the camera, boomingly loud because he was so close to the microphone.  
The girl looked at the man, then turned her head to where her mother stood. "Sarai," she said. Her voice was high and girlishly shy. "I am called Sarai, honored Elder." She gave a wobbly little curtsey. Someone in the room coughed.  
"How old are you, Sarai?"  
"I am seven. Seven years and four months." A look to her mother, and a hasty addition. "Honored Elder."  
"Sarai. That's a pretty name. You are a pretty girl. Very pretty. Come, let us see all of your beauty."  
The girl looked at the speaker, then toward her mother again, and then unbuttoned her shift, starting at the collar.  
I remembered how tiny and delicate those buttons were. They were round and smooth, like little pearls and needed to be threaded through little loops of cloth that had looked like rabbit ears. There had been six of them, going halfway down the chest. I remembered that the material of the dress had been cool to the touch and that every little gust of wind had gone through it.  
After merely four buttons, the dress already gaped open far enough at the collar for the girl to slide it off both her shoulders simultaneously and let it fall down to the floor where it pooled in a sinuous white heap.  
"Turn it off, please," I said, but my words were only breath, and the man in the video spoke over me.  
"Very beautiful indeed, little princess. Turn around for me. Yes, just like that. Such a good girl."  
As she did what he asked – stumbling a little in her ill-fitting shoes as she tread on the dress that was still pooled underfoot – her eyes kept snapping back toward the left where her mother was sitting.  
I remembered her gestures. _Slower. Move your hips like we practiced._  
Suddenly, tinny music came on, blaring painfully from the phone's speakers.  
"Dance for your prophet, Sarai. Show him all of you."  
The girl with the grotesquely painted face and flowers in her styled hair began to shimmy her slim hips and lifted her arms above her head like an exotic veil dancer. She writhed and turned, bent over and stuck out her little backside to give her audience glimpses of her most private place.  
The man in the video gave a laughing groan. He found her ridiculous and precocious and overdone, but her behavior also aroused him.  
I remembered his legs, spread wide, and him massaging the straining crotch of his pants.  
I remembered my mother mimicking a movement with her hands – laying them over her own breasts and pinching the nipples between thumb and forefinger – encouraging me to do the same even though my chest was flat and my nipples were tender-  
"Turn it off, please!" This time, it came out as a yell.  
Viking did as I asked.  
We sat in silence for a long moment. My blood pulsed in my ears and the stabbing pain behind my forehead had intensified so much that I wanted to cry out. But I did not. I would not.  
"Your _loving_ mother pimped you out to a bunch of pedophiles when you were seven, Sarai," Vike said. His voice sounded strange.  
I did not know those words, 'pimped' and 'pedophiles'. When Vike spoke, there were often words I did not know, and I rarely ever thought about it, but this one – 'pimped' – seemed to cut into me with its unknown blade.  
"A mother must do right by her daughter, as commanded by the Holy Scripture." My mouth reflexively repeated these words I had heard my mother say so often. "As a father must do right by his son. The children must be guided to follow the path of the righteous so that they may attain eternal life as their forefathers have before them."  
"Did watching this make you feel right, or righteous?" Vike barked, lifting his phone up, meaning the video the device had just played. "Gotta be honest with you, Sarai, it makes me want to fucking hack someone to pieces, starting with the grown-ups in this video."  
"It is right! It is righteous! It is on the Holy Script!" I defended. There was cold sweat on my forehead and my stomach clenched hard enough to make my throat constrict. "Mother loved the Holy Script, and she loved me! She instructed me thusly because she loved me! She taught me everything she knew and led me to the Elders who pick out the special girls so that I might meet the Prophet! What is that, if not love?!"

 _ **Viking**_

I watched Sarai, pale and shaking like a leaf with angry confusion, and something occurred to me, something that should have been glaringly obvious. Something was missing entirely in that overworked brain of hers, leaving a yawning black hole there.  
"You have no idea, do you? What a _proper_ childhood should be like? What real children do and don't do, or what proper parents do and don't do to their kids?"  
She looked stricken for a moment.  
That, right there. That broke my fucking heart.  
She caught herself, as if old coping mechanisms were kicking in. "Well, there are children on the outside, children of sinful parents who do not follow the way of-"  
"Cut. This. Bullshit!" I bellowed. This brainwashed crap was making me spitting mad every time she opened her mouth and reminded me of how deep it went. It made me sick. "Children are the same everyfuckingwhere. They all want and need the same basic things, and cult bullshit and being 'picked out' by a jury of fucking pedoes to become America's Next Pre-teen Top-hoe is _not_ one of those."  
She gave me a stoic look that said she didn't want to listen. Fuck that.  
"I know for a _fact_ that you didn't want _that_." I tipped my chin downwards toward my phone. The picture of her, seven years and four months old and all dolled up like a pageant girl and moving like a high-end stripper, showing her hairless cunt to a bunch of perverts, would forever be seared into the part of my brain where The Psycho came from. "You didn't want to _be_ _that_. No seven-year-old wants to be some old dude's fucktoy. You didn't even understand what fucking even _was_ because you were too young for that shit when they forced it on you."  
"I knew very well-"  
 _More bullshit._ I rolled my eyes and gritted my teeth. _Enough of this._  
"Tell me, were you a happy kid? Did you have a lot of toys and friends to play with? What did you want to be when you grew up, Sarai?" I asked her.  
Her eyes went glassy for a moment before she looked away. I took a look at her posture, all regal-like on her rickety-looking wheelchair, and the delicate braid of her hair and the way her hands were folded in her lap, and took a wild guess.  
"You wanted to be a princess, didn't you? With the tiara and the sparkly dresses and all that crap."  
Sarai was silent, the muscles in her cheeks working as she ground her teeth.  
Princess it was.  
Even worse, to think that she hadn't started out as a hard-as-nails tomboy-valkyrie in training like Ky's little Harper who was bound to claim a spot in the MC in a couple of years, or possibly become the first female quarterback for the Patriots, or a SR-71 Blackbird pilot, or world's richest CEO and Elon Musk's sugar mommy, or whatever the fuck she wanted.  
No, Sarai had been more like Grace and Sapphira, an actual delicate flower, a soft, gentle thing that liked daisies, the color pink and the idea of being courted by a charming prince.  
They had done a number on her. A big, stinking, evil fucking number, and because she had been soft and all alone, it had soaked all the way through and turned her into a fanatic, a rapist and abuser. She hadn't stood a fucking chance against them, and she hadn't stood a chance when her precious Judah, Prophet Kiddiefucker, set his attentions on her and made her a tool.  
Tanner was right, though. There was no excuse. And really, their brainwashing wouldn't have taken as thoroughly as it had if that monster hadn't been in her nature from the start.  
 _Well. People in glass houses, Vike.  
_ "That cult and your mother, they _lied_ to you," I told her, knowing that this was probably way too little, way too late. "If you just spread your legs, said the right words, prayed really fucking hard and never complained, that's how you would become a princess – that's what they said, wasn't it?" She didn't confirm it. She didn't have to. "They fucking lied to you. The entire time. About _everything_. The Bible you learned by heart is a fucking sham, cooked up by a disgusting old dude who wanted to fuck little girls and keep women obedient. The prophecy you were working for is about even more disgusting old dudes getting to rape even more little girls, who would eventually get pregnant and pop out even _more_ little girls to rape. That's what it was all about, the whole time. The pervert in your audition video knew. Your mother probably knew. Judah, that motherfucker, _definitely_ knew."  
Silent glaring. I sighed. Destroying someone's illusions about themselves, their lives and the people they looked up to was no fun, especially if they were the only thing they had left.  
Sarai was holding on to them with splintering fingernails, even though they were pure poison, and wouldn't let go. Stubborn bitch.  
"Let me show you something." I pulled out my phone again and went to the camera folder in which I had accumulated twenty-five gigabytes worth of pictures of videos over the years. Some I had taken myself, some were from others in the MC, many from Ash, Zane or Mae, Lilah and Madds.  
I clicked on a video, pressed 'start' and turned the screen toward her. "This is what children and parents are supposed to be like."  
The video showed a big blow-up kiddie pool full of MC munchkins, just last year. Charon, RJ, Jake, Harper, Griffin, Becky and Maya were crowded into the bright blue plastic pool, in swim trunks or madly adorable frilly polka-dotted bathing suits. They were splashing each other or shooting at Ky with their see-through plastic squirt guns. Bella sat in the background giving a giggling Lillian a ride on her thighs. Lilah, in a white summer dress, was carefully dipping baby Zeah into an empty area of water. She laughed at his stunned silence at the cool, wet feeling on his chubby legs that was followed by a spastic little full-body jerk and a delighted shriek that said "Fuck was that?! Let's do it again!" Ky suddenly turned toward the camera and lunged for it. "Vike, stop perving on my wife!" There was a shout and a booming laugh – mine – then the video shook and cut off.  
I clicked "next". Charon's fifth birthday party. Cake, candles, sparkly cone hats, a whole room of people singing Happy Birthday To You – very loudly and very off-key.  
I clicked "next". Ash's video of the kids at the park, all of them walking Trooper together like a reverse dogsled because they couldn't decide who would get to hold the leash first. Mae walked up front, smiling and taking pictures of the scene on her own phone.  
Next - a short clip of Charon sleeping draped over Trooper, with an actual snot bubble that got bigger when he exhaled and smaller when he inhaled like in a cartoon, on his left nostril. Ash, who had made the video, reached out to pop the bubble. The boy and the dog didn't wake up. Ash was wheezing with laughter.  
Next – a surreptitiously filmed video showing Styx, his two sons and Ky's twins Becky and Maya all sitting around the kitchen. Styx was singing and strumming the guitar to Toy Story's 'You've got a friend in me', as sung by Tom Waits, and the kids were all singing along.  
Next – Phebe, Sapphira, Grace, Ky and Lilah all sitting in a circle, braiding and brushing one another's hair. The picture was shaking because I had been laughing so much when I made that video. "Piss off, Vike," Ky snarled and flicked Grace's hair around like he'd been born doing French braids. Lilah was knotting her husband's long blond hair into a _precious_ little coronet, a cheeky grin on her face. "I want to- I want to-" a high, girly voice rang out from the off, then Harper jumped into view and pulled on my hands to get me down to her level and into braiding range. The video shook wildly. "Unky Vike, I want to braid your beard!" "Hell, yeah!" my voice answered. "Braided beards are kick-ass Norse warrior stuff, not all girly like-"  
Next – Mae with Charon, RJ and a small Bump number 3 in an afternoon snooze, piled atop one another in a tangle of limbs, pillows and blankets. With a contented sigh, a small smile and her eyes still closed, Mae lifted the hand that was dangling off the couch and reached toward the phone, inviting her old man to her side. Styx quickly cut the video.  
Next - Sapphira and the munchkins finger-painting windows at one of the cabins. Griffin reaching out toward the lens with a green-smudged finger - my voice yelling "oy! Keep your filthy paws off my-"  
Next - Jake and Harper on tiny bicycles, with their training wheels still on, Ky and Lilah walking right behind them just in case, with Griffin perched on Ky's shoulders. Grandpa Stephen and his grandson Charon rode some way ahead on their own bicycles. Mae sat perched in a very lady-like side-saddle on her father's carrier, waving at the camera.  
Next – Lilah with a blond, curly-haired cherub on her lap. "Rebeccah! Say 'I love you'!" she encouraged and gently shook Rebeccah's little hands. "I love you!" Baby Becky looked at her with huge blue eyes and parroted "Aya wah-woo!" Both Lilah and Ky behind the phone laughed, making Becky giggle as well. Suddenly, another baby voice rang out, clearly saying, "I love you!" The phone swung around to Maya who was sitting on Ky's lap, making eyes as big and blue as her sister's as she munched on a soggy cookie. "Whoa!" Ky exclaimed and laughed. "Who's this little show-off?!" "Did you get that?" Lilah asked, all excited, "Let me see!" before the video cut off.  
Next – me, Bull and the munchkins playing baseball, or a game that involved running around and hitting balls with sticks, anyway. Trooper sped onto the pitch and plucked the ball out of the air with a ten-foot leap. From behind the camera, Ash laughed and hooted, "Attaboy, Troop!"  
Next – Three year old RJ sitting at the kitchen table molding something out of brownish clay, me behind the camera asking with clear amusement in my loud voice "RJ, what'chu doin'? Where'd you get that stuff?" A muffled response, then me again, chuckling: "Oh, Trooper gave it to you?" and another booming laugh, followed by a stutter-free "Fuck!" from the Prez before the video cut off.  
Next – Grace unpacking a Christmas present – a violin, small enough for her fingers to handle the fingerboard. The smile she aimed at the camera was so fucking bright. "Thank you, mom! Thank you, dad!" she wailed, on the brink of happy tears. "Merry Christmas, angel," Lilah's voice came from behind the camera. " _I_ picked that," Ky added from beside her. "Made sure that you can totally hook it up to an amplifier and blow the roof off this cabin! D'you like it?" Grace nodded through her tears, gingerly put the instrument down and leapt towards her dad to hug him. Lilah's phone's microphone caught the "Aw, you know I love you, too, sweet pea" Ky had whispered into his daughter's hair.  
Then, on to photos, each a stand-alone snapshot. The kids and their parents at get-togethers in McKinney state park, baking stick bread over a fire. Building tree houses near the cabins. Playing on their dad's stationary bikes. Watching Flame repair a bike with attentive faces. Eating ice cream with their feet in a dirt puddle. Pulling funny faces at the camera. Drinking brightly colored sugary shit through loopy straws with their moms. Pulling each other's hair. Fighting with balloon swords. Showing off lost teeth and gaps in their grins. Sleeping in someone's arms. Reading books upside down. Doodling on each other's plastered arms, their noses still bloody from whatever stupid idea they'd had. Exchanging doggy kisses with Trooper. Dressing up in their mom's dresses and their dad's cuts. Sitting on one of Sia's horses. Riding on their dads' shoulders. Building sandcastles at the beach.  
Playing, smiling, laughing. Kids just being kids.  
The reality wasn't all hugs and kisses, of course. Families were full of fussy, cranky monsters, to say nothing of the kids. These pictures were only small moments in between long periods in which Styx and Mae, Ky and Lilah and Flame and Madds navigated marriage, parenthood, and jobs that included being in charge of a notorious and very busy MC, but my brothers and their wives made these moments count every single time. Even if their dads and sometimes their moms were often "off to work", and things were difficult when the club was at war, there was always plenty of love to go around for the kids.  
Sarai had gone very still.  
"You were fucking robbed," I said quietly, then repeated it slowly. I needed to drive the point home. "You. Were. Robbed, Sarai. Your mother and the people at your commune, they took _this_ from you and gave you a nightmare instead. They made _you_ a nightmare."  
She didn't acknowledge my words, but she didn't deny them either. Perhaps that was a start.  
I suddenly realized that my thoughts and my pulse were racing like I was going for a kill. I needed to let off some steam soon. I wanted to avenge the seven-year-old that wanted to be a princess and got turned into a murdering, raping Vegas showgirl. Maybe Tanner had been right to ask. Was I letting this bitch get under my skin?  
Or was she already there?  
I took my phone back which had made it into her stiff hands halfway through the slideshow. Then, I got up from my chair and made for the door.  
Honestly, I wasn't sure I would come back. This whole shit had shaken me. I thought I had known every square inch of the abyss of human fuckedup-ness, but as it turned out, there were dark spots still, and Sarai was living in them. Keeping the memory of her fiend of a mother and the human cesspool of a cult alive.  
"My name means 'princess'", Sarai suddenly spoke up. "In Hebrew, in God's language, Sarai means 'my princess'."  
If voices could have colors, then hers would be gray. I was surprised at how much it physically hurt to hear it like that, like my ribcage closed down on the organs in it.  
I nodded – it had fit her. If I imagined the sweet girl in the white dress from the video without the hooker war paint, then the name was a perfect fit.  
I left her sitting there in that room. I couldn't help her. No one could help her, really. It was entirely up to her to let everything sink in, all the way through to the bottom. If she refused and kept clinging to her cult-Bible-bullshit, I figured there wasn't anything anyone could do.  
And _I_ \- I needed to stay the fuck away from her. I shouldn't have got involved in the first place. I was actively undermining what little hope of coping she had, and I was wasting my own time.  
I almost ran toward the exit, barking "family emergency" at the Asian-looking nurse when she tried to hold me up. Mels also came at me on the corridor. I told her to piss off. I was not in the mood.  
Standing in the parking lot next to my Fatboy, inhaling a cigarette and torching the roughly 30 pages of testimony with the help of my zippo until burning and singeing shreds of curled-up paper flew up into the sky, I was suddenly homesick as fuck. Looking at my phone's contact list, I debated calling someone – AK maybe, or Flame, or even Ky who might put me through to my favorite girl, Harper – but decided against it. It would only make it worse.  
I buried the phone in my pocket, flicked the smoke onto the asphalt, got on my bike and rode.

 _ **Sarai**_

As she pushed me in my wheelchair back toward my room, Nurse Lee asked me again whether my' husband' had told me anything about the 'family emergency' that had caused him to leave the clinic in such a hurry, or when he was planning to come back.  
I merely shrugged and shook my head. My throat was so tight that I would not have been able to relay the information to her even if I had had it.  
When we arrived in my room, I declined when she offered food, water, analgesics against my obvious headache and a new shift to wear since the one I had one was dark with sweat under my arms and on my lower back. I asked for peace and quiet, and she thankfully left me.  
Peace and quiet - something I knew I would now have plenty of.  
He would not return.  
I pulled the blanket over my head, burying myself in the stiff white material. When I closed my eyes, I saw pictures and videos of people that were not me and heard children's laughter, and my mother's voice saying "Be a good girl now".  
I had been a good girl.  
I had been… _such_ a good girl.

/ **TBC**


	10. Chapter 9

_**Viking**_

"Holy fucking shit. Look what the cat dragged in," Bull hollered from the bar when he spotted me in the doorway. The small crowd turned and shouted greetings at me. "The lost Hangman finally found his way home."  
"Heard the entire club was collapsing! Couldn't leave you useless assholes alone for another second," I boomed back and accepted slaps on my shoulders as I made my way toward the bar.  
"Fuck, man, you're walking like a pimp who's broken his balls. What the hell happened?" Tank asked as I slumped onto a bar stool like a bag of cement. I was a bit stiff from riding, still more than a little hungover, and the new bruises were just coming in.  
"Russians happened."  
Well, one of them might've been Kazakh or Ukrainian something.  
"At least ten of them, maybe more."  
Six. But with enough meat and muscle on them to make ten people out of it.  
"Met them in a bar outside Fort Stockton. Was nice talking to them… for a while, at least." I grinned. "Now give me a fucking beer, gather 'round and let Uncle Vike tell you all about the bits and pieces he remembers about the last two days."  
Beauty, always the sweetheart, shoved a cold one into my hand and leaned over the bar to give me a smacking kiss on the cheek that made her old man go 'woah, woah, slow down there, doll. You're gonna give the man cockstand' . She just grinned and said to me, "Good to have you back, fucker." I gave her a wink and sucked on the beer while everyone crowded around me.  
Everyone wanted to hear about the twelve-to-fourteen Russians whose asses I had kicked in that bar, followed by publicly fucking the one I had been reasonably sure was the female of the group and learning the Russian word for 'anaconda'.  
(It was 'anaconda'. Very anticlimactic.)  
Bull came up to me and gave me my cut back, and just like that, I felt like my old self again.  
No one in attendance asked about El Paso.  
No one in attendance even _thought_ about El fucking Paso.  
My phone with its long-dead battery was like a brick in my pocket.

/

"Flame! Get over here and take your snot monkeys off me!"  
I had passed by AK's and Phebe's cabin to find the two of them having a bit of a row about fuck knew what. They barely even took time to acknowledge me before they were back at each other's throats. I figured it was their own fucking fault for getting married and knocked up.  
I grabbed Isaiah and Lillian who they were supposed to be babysitting, got out of there before the pregnancy-hormone-enhanced make-up sex started and made my way over to Maddie's and Flame's house. No one was home, though, so Madds was probably still at the hospital with Mae as Ash had told me on the phone a few days ago, and Flame was sulking at the work shop where I found him, welding goggles on his face, welder in hand, Black Sabbath blasting from the high fidelity loudspeakers Zane had installed under the ceiling.  
It was almost like the brother was a normal, well-adjusted dude. I was proud of him.  
Flame took the goggles off, set the welder down, switched the music off and took a fussy Zeah from my arms. Lily was in her carrier, snoozing through the noise.  
"When did you get back?" he asked me, cradling Zeah's fuzzy head.  
"I could tell you, but you have no idea what day or what time it is, do you?" I answered the question with one of my own and put Lily and her carrier down on a bench. "When's the last time you slept? You look like shit."  
He turned away and went to the workbench which he cleared with one hand. Then he laid his son down on the cleared space and pulled open some drawers, getting out an arsenal of wet wipes, diapers and baby powder.  
Call me old-fashioned, but nappy-changing was not my thing. I turned away and instead got busy looking at what the brother had done to the poor, defenseless Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail Classic.  
"She promised she wouldn't ever go back to hospital," Flame spoke up as he wrangled a onesie onto Zeah's wriggling body like a pro. "After two years ago."  
Madds had spent almost her entire pregnancy in bed at Austin State Hospital due to abdominal pain, high blood pressure and the high risk that came with carrying twins. For her sake, Flame had stayed by her side the whole time, holding on to sanity by the skin of his teeth. Madds herself had 'never wanted to see a hospital from the inside again' after being discharged. But now she was back there for fuck knew how long, determined to stay until her big sister and a newly hatched baby niece could go home.  
"She's got it under control. Madds is tough as nails. Gotta trust your bitch to handle herself." No sense in telling him that normal hospitals were completely harmless. He _knew_ that, but his cross-wired brain wasn't ever accepting it. Same with churches. They were his kryptonite. "Plus, she ain't alone. Mae and Styx are there, too. They'll send her back to you before long."  
He nodded once but didn't reply. He stroked Zeah's brow eleven times before hefting him back up onto his arms and carrying him around in soothing circles.  
I asked him a few questions about workshop business and club business and about Ash and his deal to take his mind off the topic. Flame's mind didn't really work that way, but I could at least try. Plus, I needed to get back in the loop, asap. The brawl in Fort Stockton had been kind of re-initiation into my life, a second baptism with beer, blood, spit and sweat that washed away the stink of beige-and-mint-colored rehab facilities. Now I needed to get busy again. Go on a club run. Take out some assholes from other clubs who tried to usurp our turf. Break some jaws. Immerse myself in proper work. Do something that I was good at for a change. Get my life back and earn back some trust. Might as well pump Flame for information while I had the chance.  
Flame sat down on the bench next to Lily and touched her tiny balled fist with a finger. "Are you gonna stay here for long?" he suddenly asked.  
I crossed my arms. "You tryin' to get rid of me, bro? I just got here a couple of hours ago." I thumped my palm against my chest and sniffed theatrically. "You're hurtin' my feelings, man." With the over-the-top drama, even Flame would get the sarcasm.  
I looked around the workshop. The brother wasn't just fucking around to let off steam. He had actually finished some projects that had been sitting on the backlog for ages. "You want me to take your spawn back to the cabin so you can finish slaughtering this beautiful bike in peace?" I asked.  
"Are you gonna go back to El Paso soon?" he asked back.  
He was still watching Lily so he didn't see my grimace.  
"Not planning to, no." Fuck me, was he really trying to get rid of me? Or did he want to punish me for having stayed away for so long before? _Well, no other way to find out except asking._ "Why you asking?"  
Flame hesitated, then shrugged both shoulders. "Man should be with his bitch," he said as if that explained everything.  
"You mean Mels?" I asked reflexively. "She ain't my bitch." Under my breath I said, "Over my dead and rotting corpse."  
"Not Mels," Flame said.  
I narrowed my eyes. "Did Tanner talk to you?" I distinctly remembered telling the wannabe-Aryan to keep his fat mouth shut, or else.  
He looked up at me. "No."  
I breathed in and out and decided that he was telling the truth. Didn't matter. Sooner or later, I would find an easy reason to grind axes with dear Magda. _Meddling asshole.  
_ "Who did you mean, if not Mels?"  
"Bitch you found at the Nazi base," he said. "Ain't she still in El Paso? Clearwood?"  
I had almost forgotten that he had dropped us off there. Must've been two lifetimes ago.  
"Yeah, she is," I said, then added, "I think," as if I was fooling anyone.  
Flame kept quiet in that way only he could.  
Made me crazy.  
Made me talk.  
"What the fuck makes you think she's my bitch?" She _wasn't._  
"You kept looking at her," he said. "During the drive to El Paso. Couldn't keep your eyes off her. Looked at her like she was the best piece of ass you had ever seen, even though she looked and smelled like a dying mangy dog." He shrugged.  
"Shit, man," I muttered. Perceptive motherfucker, seeing things that weren't even there. "I was only making sure she hadn't croaked yet."  
Flame nodded and said nothing else. He was already busy with his kids again.  
While I partied with the brothers at the bar that night, and had a foursome with some club pussy that had newly arrived while I wasn't there, and even while I fell asleep underneath one of them (or it might have been some other chick, I hadn't been sober enough to remember any of them to begin with), that conversation kept replaying in my head. _Man should be with his bitch. She's still in El Paso. You kept looking at her._ So that morning, I didn't even wait for the hangover to kick in but just kept drinking until it finally fell silent.

/

 _ **Sarai**_

"Alright, Mrs Sorensen. Remember: Careful, but fierce!"  
The physical therapist was a bubbly brunette who insisted I call her Shirley.  
"Please, call me Sarai," I implored her again, but she waved me off.  
"No can do, darlin'. Strictly protocol and such. Now, let's get y'all literally back on y'all's feet. Up you go!"  
With her help and clutching a wooden bar with my other hand, I did get onto my feet. They felt… foreign and too thin. My bodily weight, slight as it was, seemed too much to put on them. I feared my heel bone would pierce the skin of my sole.  
"You're doing fantastic!" Shirley exclaimed and forced a step, then a second.  
It hurt. My feet, calves, knees and hips all felt so brittle. My abdomen hurt deep inside. Barely ten steps in, I was shaking and sweating all over and my heart was pumping heavily in my chest.  
I turned around at the end of the bar, clutched the wood with my other hand, and kept walking. Breathing. Hurting. Knowing that I would do this again tomorrow, and the day after, because that was my new schedule. Unsure whether I could trust Shirley's promise that it would become easier.  
Shirley kept me for another fifteen minutes. After that, nurse Jiménez washed me and then pushed me in my wheelchair into the oasis, where Dr Gonzales was waiting for me.  
Conversations with people who I had no hope of understanding and who had no hope of understanding me.  
Food that made me sick to my stomach and left me hungrier every time.  
Two silent books.  
Letters that no one would ever read.  
Dreams full of happy memories that did not belong to me, and of happy memories that were mine but turned rotten halfway through, like apples full of maggots that were already in my mouth and in my nose – followed by long, sleepless nights.  
Physical exercise that left my body sore and so tired I was shaking and unable to move.  
That was all I had now. I wondered if this was the just punishment for being a _fucked-up monster_.  
Was there such a thing as atonement in this world? Condign vengeance? Was my pain making a difference? Or had I tipped the scales so far that there was nothing I could possibly offer as recompense?  
After living my whole life as a monster, could I possibly un-become one if I just suffered enough?  
No one was there to tell me.

/

 _ **Viking  
**_  
"-and she yells 'Da! Da! Da!', and I'm like 'I'm not your Da, honeycakes, but if you're into that…!' Crazy fucking Russian bitches."  
People were laughing. And complaining because I apparently had told this story before, but mainly laughing. I swiped the joint from Slash's mouth – "You're too young for that, kid. Your brain cells are still copulating and shit. Can't have you become a dum-dum!" – and pulled so hard the reefer almost entirely crumbled between my fingers. Then, I handed the thing back to him – "Thanks. Asshole."-"You're still young. Got two strong legs. Get up and get yourself a new one, there's a good lad." – and leaned back to let the effects seep into my frontal lobe.  
My brothers and I talked smack for a bit. Several sluts crawled over my lap and nibbled on my earlobe, just how I liked it. The prospects kept bringing our good friends Jim and Jack over. Whenever I needed to step out for a piss, some slut was there to lend a helping hand (or other body part) with wrangling the anaconda back into my pants (eventually).  
So considerate, great service, five stars.  
Slash, Smiler, Bull, I and a couple of hang-arounds whose names I hadn't asked were just enjoying ourselves when Beauty and Letti came to the table, looking like a pair of storm clouds with double-Ds. Must've just gotten here from work at their store, _Ride_. Bull immediately pulled Letti onto his lap.  
"Not right now, loverboy. Got a bone to pick with the Swedish oaf here." She giggled and let her man tickle her tonsils with his tongue in spite of her protests.  
I was Norwegian, not Swedish, but that wasn't really the interesting part of that sentence.  
"Bone? Who wants to bone me?" I asked, zoned in on Beauty, who was standing before me looking as menacing as a five foot seven Barbie doll could manage, and wiggled my eyebrows. "So you're finally bored with Tank? Told you that would happen."  
"Not even in your dreams," Beauty retorted and crossed her arms over her stacked chest. I fucking loved it when she did that. How fucking convenient that Tank wasn't here, indeed.  
"Vike, there's been some bitch calling the phone at the shop five goddamn times today. Said she wanted to talk to you, then she asked me for 'your _other_ number' 'cause your phone's dead. What the hell did you do to that chick?!"  
I was way too drunk and a bit stoned, and my brain rolled over in my head before it farted out a thought: _Sarai.  
_ I suddenly felt very sober again.  
"Five times in four hours, Vike. She was one persistent puss, I tell you. Kept on and on about a medical emergency. Did you knock some bitch up and left her in the lurch?!"  
Slash started laughing like that was the most hilarious thing he had ever heard. I kicked his chair. He overbalanced and fell on his ass. Kept on laughing. Fucking youths.  
"Beauty, my precious dove," I told her, wheezing for no good reason. "Your interest in procreation with me is entirely understandable. I mean…" I puffed out my chest and gestured at the entirety of my body.  
Beauty rolled her eyes. "Vike-"  
"I would absolutely make that exception for you to make all of your eggs happy, but you should know that I always. _Always._ Wrap that shit up." It was true… now. Even an idiot like me learns a lesson when peeing burned so much that he cuddled the porcelain throne for emotional support afterwards and had himself a good cry. Chlamydia –not even once, ideally , but at the very least not a second time.  
"That said – material failure in love gloves is a thing, especially when they're up against swimmers like mine." I paused. "Which is why I prefer to finish in one of the other two available holes. Ever since I started my pineapple diet, bitches have a strong opinion on this, too, if you know what I'm saying."  
Smiler groaned a " _way_ too much information" into his beer.  
Beauty looked at me like I just shat into her handbag.  
I shrugged at her. "Well, you fucking asked." I turned to Smiler. "She asked me. I answered. I'm being polite here." He just glared at me. Or he may have been laughing. The difference was very slight with Smiler.  
"Yeah, anyway. I'm telling you so you sort that shit out. She's blocking the phone at the shop, she's slowing down the business, and she's getting on my nerves."  
"And mine," Letti added, un-fusing herself from her guy for a token comment. "And Phebe's."  
"Yeah," Beauty nodded. "She's kept Phee on the horn for fifteen whole minutes. Phebe's too polite to hang up on anyone, especially on a chick that sounds desperate."  
Another brain-fart: _What the hell did Sarai talk to Phebe about for fifteen fucking minutes?!_  
 _Desperate?_  
My leg started to bounce.  
"Can't you just ask Zane or Tanner to block her number?" Slash asked from his spot on the floor. I hoped he had broken his ass in the fall and couldn't get up.  
"Not fucking Tanner," I barked before I could think about it.  
If Tanner heard that Sarai had somehow tracked me and my phone number down and was now calling me and having long conversations with club members' old ladies, he would definitely talk to Styx about it.  
Then one of us would probably die before this was over.  
And one of my brothers would go to cut Sarai down. A Hangman's wrath didn't come with an expiration date.  
 _Not your problem, Vike,_ my inner AK reminded me. _You walked away from that. Ain't your business no more. Wasn't your business to begin with._  
"Slash, honey, do I look like the type of woman to you who can't operate her own damn phone?" Beauty asked Slash and ignored my interjection, one hand on her hip. "I know how to block a number without Zane or Tanner's help, thank you very much. Lord knows I get a lot of training for it, what with a gang of Miss Universe's working at my store."  
Mae, Lilah, Phebe, Sapphira and Bella had all helped out at the store in the past or were still semi-permanently employed there, which was probably one of the reasons why the sales figures were so impressive and the repeat customers were 95% male. Not that business had been bad before the Victoria's Secret invasion. Beauty was a fucking bombshell herself, and Letti was built like a Venus figurine.  
"But this persistent bitch has called under four different numbers already. Which is why I need you-" She kicked me in the shin to refocus my attention. "-to sort it the hell out. Got that?"  
 _Wait, wait,_ my brain went. Four different numbers?  
"She say her name?" I asked Beauty, trying my damndest to sound bored.  
"Since when are you asking bitches' names before poking them with your worm?" Smiler lifted an eyebrow.  
"Melody, I think," Letti supplied from her perch on Bull's thighs. "Or Melanie or something."  
Like a valve that had opened, all the pressure left my body. _Of course_ it wasn't Sarai calling. Why the fuck would she be calling me, anyway? Did a quasi-Amish bitch even know how to use a phone? Mels shoulda been my first guess, really. She was just the clingy type of bitch that would call five times in four hours, and she did have my number. She also knew about _Ride_ and that some old ladies worked there.  
"And she said something about a doctor and a cardiologist. I stopped listening from call number three onwards, so…"  
Cardiologist? A heart doctor? The fuck?  
And the tension was back.  
"Working theory," Bull spoke up from underneath his bitch. "Vike fucked a married one in El Paso, her husband came home early, laid eyes on Vike's blindingly white naked ass and had a coronary, and now they're trying to get him to pay their medical bills."  
That had everyone laughing, except for me. I was still thinking about a medical emergency that required a fucking cardiologist.  
Before I was even finished with that thought, I was already on my way up to AK's cabin. I suddenly really needed to have a chat with Phebe.

I barely managed to pull up at AK and Phebe's cabin, knocking down a bird feeder as I parked.  
"Shit," I muttered, got off my bike – with minimal balance problems – and tried to get the wood-and-stone contraption vertical again. Problem was, the Earth wasn't horizontal at the moment, and I wasn't perpendicular to it for the most part, and my hands were currently a little farther away from my body than they used to be. That's why I loved pot – it had the same effect on my glans. Not that I needed help in that department.  
There was a rustling sound, and when I looked up, Sarai stared at me from the trees, just fifteen yards away from me.  
I froze. My breath froze in my lungs.  
Was this the emergency Mels had called me for? The fact that Sarai had escaped from Clearwood? Was this what Phebe had been talking about with her for fifteen minutes? Had she arranged for her to come here?  
I stared and she stared back.  
"Fuck. Me," I breathed once the first shock had worn off. "You're looking good," I found myself saying, because it was true. She looked healthy and strong in a vest, loose tan-colored pants and knee-high boots. Completely different from the white paper bag that hung off her too-thin frame in Clearwood. Fuck knew how she had recovered that quickly.  
She flinched, backed up two steps, then turned around and ran.  
"Hey! Wait!" I hollered and went after her, tripping over the former bird feeder but barely staying upright. "Where are you going?!"  
"Viking?" A door opened. Phebe stepped onto the porch. "What is the meaning-"  
"Not fucking now!" I growled at her and went after Sarai. Her hair was a beacon and the thin, wide-spaced trees didn't offer her any cover to hide from me.  
Turned out, running and being very drunk and stoned didn't mix too well. My lungs pumped like a pair of bellows while my feet, also located several yards further down my legs than usual, stumbled over every little ditch and bump. Even on her considerably shorter legs, Sarai was flitting ahead of me like a hummingbird.  
I didn't really look where I was going, except for _after her_ , but we must have run in a wide-ish circle or a loop because next thing I knew, AK's cabin was in front of us again, and there was Phebe, right in my way, pointing a gun at my chest, eyes blazing and her red hair bright as the sunset.  
Pointing a gun.  
A gun.  
A. Gun.  
 _Gun!_  
"FUCK!"  
I skittered to a halt on a soggy patch of soil, lost my footing and landed hard on my elbows and ass just as Phebe lifted the gun up and fired a warning shot into the air. The clap of thunder made my ears ring.  
"Viking!" she bellowed as much as her feminine voice allowed, especially seeing that she was breathing hard through her own fear. The gun was steady, though, and pointed right at me as I lay before her feet. I had zero doubt that AK had taught her how to handle that thing and how to neatly put a bullet into a target. "Explain yourself! Why are you chasing my daughter?! Are you inebriated?"  
Her daughter? I blinked, blinked again, then rubbed my eyes. "Sapphira?" I asked dumbly and leaned over to look around AK's bitch. There on the porch, was Sapphira in a vest, tan pants and knee-high boots, grabbing on to a wooden beam for support. Her face was white with panic and she was panting. When she caught me looking, she flinched again, turned on her heel and ran inside, quickly closing the door behind her.  
"Holy fucking crap," I muttered to myself and touched my head. It was pounding. "Fuck, Phebe. Sapphira. I'm fucking sorry, alright?"  
They looked somewhat alike. Same body type, almost the same hair color. Must've been the same age, give or take a year, too. Gone through the same sort of hell. In the tree's shade and the twilight of evening, the illusion was perfect. Also, I was high and drunk and had Sarai on my brain.  
"You _know_ how skittish she is, after all these years! You simply _cannot_ charge at her like a bull at a red cape, Vike. I fact, I am fairly certain that you should not do that to _any_ woman. It is frightening!"  
A roaring thunder quickly rose up and then died off. "Phebe!?"  
Ugh, _shit_. Back-up had arrived.  
I rubbed the bridge of my nose again. My face felt full of ants.  
"Over here!" Phebe called back and stepped out onto the clearing so that AK could find her.  
I lay back and waited for judge/executioner to make his way over to me, trying to get my breathing and heartbeat under control. I was sweating like a nun on a cucumber farm, and my mouth was flooding with pre-puke saliva. Man, a lecture was _exactly_ what I needed right now. Also, there was no fucking way AK would let me near his bitch to ask her about that phone call any time soon. Fantastic.  
The grass and leaves rustled. "What the fuck, Vike."  
He didn't sound angry. Fuck. That was even worse.  
I lifted my head slightly – bad idea – to look at him. He stood a few feet away from me, arms crossed. "I said I was sorry, a'right?"  
"I wasn't asking for an apology. That said – you're gonna give one to Saff and to Phebe, and it better be a real fucking good one. Me, I want a fucking explanation, man. What the fuck is going on with you? You're a goddamn train wreck since you got back. Even worse than usual."  
I pictured myself trying to explain any of the shit that had been 'going on with me' this past month and couldn't even get past the point where I had found a barely alive bitch in a Nazi camp, identified her has an old enemy, and then pretended to be her fucking husband in order to smuggle her into a medical facility on fucking day 1, let alone all the days that followed. None of this crap made any sense, especially not for me. Making other people's shit my business wasn't my style. _Helping_ wasn't my style, not even when I personally knew the sad ass who needed my help. And honestly, I fucking hated card games.  
So instead of explaining anything to him, I laughed. Nothin' else I could do. My life was fucking absurd right now, and I was stoned, therefore it was hilarious.  
AK considered me with a dark fucking expression on his face that only made me laugh harder for a good long while.  
"Don't know if you noticed, but shit's not ideal right now," he bit out once I had calmed down again. "Things are tense. Everyone's running on steam. If you're not here to _be here_ , you're in the fucking way."  
I rolled my eyes, which also made my stomach heave. "Don't be fucking dramatic. I _am_ here. I'm keeping the sluts busy. That's something, right?"  
AK looked at me the way only a sniper looked at people. " _You_ 're keeping _them_ busy, alright, but _they_ 're not keeping _you_ busy. That's why you're such a drunk, baked, brain-dead permanent pain in everyone's ass right now." He shook his head and huffed, gesturing at me lying in the dirt. "Fuck were you thinking, coming at Saff like that? Fucking hell, man. Phebe was frantic calling me for help. If you weren't maximally pathetic already, I'd kick your ass right now."  
And with that, he was walking away. Ladies and gentlemen, my best fucking friend. "'K. Come on, man. It's me." My tongue was thick and heavy.  
"Is it?" he asked over his shoulder. "Seems to me it's just a piss-ant who's running from whatthefuckever happened in El Paso, where he stayed and did whatthefuckever for a whole month without so much as a call. Sober up and sort your shit out, Vike." He hesitated as if he wanted to say more, then shook his head and walked away toward his cabin.  
I groaned and let myself fall backward again from where I had been propped up on my elbows. The world above me spun wildly for a second, and my stomach did a couple of flips to match.  
My dead phone dug uncomfortably into my right ass cheek.  
I groaned again, rolled over, threw up and then I must've passed out.  
When I came to, it was the middle of the night. The full moon was high in the sky. AK had left the porch light on, but inside the house everything was dark.  
I dragged myself to my feet and then somehow made my way towards my cabin. I caught a very cold shower, threw on some fresh clothes, packed some shit and got on my bike which I retrieved from AK's yard. (I may or may not have kicked over the bird feeder on that occasion.)  
Nothing like waking up and finding yourself lying in the cold dirt in your own puke to put things into perspective.  
Just short of nine hours later, right at high noon, I arrived at the Clearwood Treatment, Rehabilitation and Recovery Center, nursing the hangover from hell and wondering what the fuck I was doing.  
"Finishing business that ain't mine no more," I muttered to myself and walked in through the doors.

/

 _ **Sarai**_

I woke to a strange sound. It was a melodious wail that seemed to reach me from far away, once out of focus, then crystal clear again. Then a man lamented, "And it makes me wonder."  
I listened in suspense, but the man never explained what 'it' was, nor why he wondered about it, or where his thoughts led him, exactly. Instead, he talked about a forest, a piper, the May queen and the wind. Many of his words I could not understand, but the tone of his voice and the strummed notes in the background had me floating as if in a dream.  
Then, a noise came on like a cat's cries in a furious thunderstorm, and the man's voice seemed to burst into my ears like physical blows. The skin of my body, from my toes to my scalp, broke out in goose bumps as his words reached a crescendo. My eyes flew open as the flood of sound and music and pure vocal energy washed over me.  
After a minute or so, the storm abated, but my body still tingled. I clenched and unclenched my fingers and toes to feel if they were still there.  
"Yeah, don't worry. That's totally normal," a very familiar voice said.  
My heart stuttered. The machine above my head gave a series of long beeps.  
I turned my head on my pillow and saw him sitting there, his black little device in his hand.  
Like he had never gone away. Like he had always been right there.  
"When I first heard this song, I must've been something like fourteen, and juuust a little drunk," he told me. "That guitar solo, though, and then the drums and that voice… Made my head explode. _Wham._ Pretty sure I grew out the last few hairs on my balls that very second, just because of those last two-and-a-half fucking minutes of that song. Next morning, I had two black eyes, one broken wrist, and the taste of the most beautiful bitch in the bar still on my tongue." He grinned, shook his head and nodded at the same time. His eyes looked at something in the middle distance, something I could not see. "Good times."  
My mouth opened and closed. I did not know, what to say or what to think.  
"Some crappy made-in-Taiwan phone speakers are far from ideal, of course, even if the phone is pretty high-end. This song deserves to be played on proper loudspeakers, with amps and some real wattage behind it. When they start in on that last stanza, you're supposed to feel it on your fucking face. But this'll have to do for now." He shrugged, paused, looked at me, lifted an eyebrow.  
"So, what's the verdict?" He waved the device – the phone – in the air. "Ungodly or heavenly?"  
I worked some saliva across my chapped lips and found my voice. "I—I am not sure."  
The Bible and my teachers had always been so rigorous in differentiating between the evil and the righteous, and I had always felt clearly whether any one thing was one or the other. Now, however, my intuition and my thoughts were chaotic – also an effect of the drugs in my veins, perhaps? – and the Bible I knew by heart, and my teachers, had both proven themselves to be… unreliable… treacherous… false.  
Was it possible for something to be both sinful and divine at the same time?  
Was it possible for something to be ungodly when it made you feel like ecstatic praying? Like the most passionate sermon?  
I shook my head. Music could not be like this in reality.  
Maybe I really was only in a delirium? Was Viking merely a hallucination?  
"Before you break your brain thinking about this, how about we just listen to the thing a few more times? Here," he said and tossed the black gadget onto my blanket, right in front of my hands. "Just press 'play'. That's the little triangle down there in the middle."  
Then he leaned back and sank down in his chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him, put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes as if he meant to take a nap. As I looked at him – really looked at him – I could hardly believe how, after a mere week, I had already forgotten exactly how _large_ he was. I could smell the fabric of his jeans, mixed with male sweat, soap, tobacco smoke, gasoline, dust and the leather of his boots. His presence in the room was more than just the scent in the air, though. It felt like a resistance in my pulse, like something that made itself known with every beat.  
I inched my fingers up to the phone's glossy black plastic. Its surface was perfectly smooth and slick and faintly warm under my fingertips. It was the same device that had shown me my past in sharp, aching contrast to the past and present of a dozen beautiful children, and of men and women in love.  
Could I conjure all of this from thin air and heartfelt desires? Everything – every _one_ – looked, sounded, smelled, felt so _real_.  
"Why ain't I hearing Jimmy Page making love to his guitar yet?" Viking lifted one eyelid and squinted at me. "Pressing play is not against your religion, is it?"  
"I am not sure," I reiterated.  
Uncertainty. It was all I was saying and thinking and feeling of late. I was so tired of it but could not shake it, just like I could not shake the ache of my body, or that of my mind.  
Vike shrugged a shoulder. "If you end up meeting the big guy and he asks you about it, you can tell him I forced you to do it 'cause it's for your own good. Now press that fucking button, sugarbun, or I'll come over there and make you."  
I inhaled deeply, and then pressed the button.  
We listened to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant – and John Paul Jones and John Bonham whose names Viking introduced after the third listen, referring to the four men as 'Led Zeppelin, one of the greatest fucking bands in the history of music' – in silence, but I saw Vike move his fingers along with the movements of the instruments, and mouth along some lines of the song.  
Before long, so was I, because sometimes words _had_ two meanings, and my spirit _was_ crying for leaving.  
I sat there, holding a phone in my hand that buzzed with the force of the music it played for us, in the presence of the devil who had returned to me.  
For a short while, I felt at peace.  
And it made me wonder.

/

 **TBC**


	11. Chapter 10

_**PART 4**_

 _ **Viking**_

"So. You wanna tell me what really happened?" I asked as I dealt the next round. We were playing rummy over the extendable tabletop of Sarai's upgraded hospital bed. They were still continuously monitoring her heart. On the trolley, meds formed a small molehill.  
She seemed confused for a second before she clearly caught my meaning. Her expression closed up.  
"Yeah, that time you tried to kill yourself," I spelled it out for her. "Again."  
After chewing me out for my unexplained absence for fifteen minutes, Doctor McGowan had told me something about a weakened heart muscle due to drugs and sickness – she had mostly blamed the Syphilis but said that the cardiologist had diagnosed Sarai with 'cardiac insufficiency' – but I knew that wasn't the whole story. Sarai had been found drenched in sweat and passed out on the floor of her room by the night nurse. No one had even attempted to explain to me why she had even been out of bed but I had some ideas.  
"Suicide is an unpardonable sin," she non-answered my question and took up her cards.  
"What's one more," I commented drily.  
She stilled and pressed her too-pale lips together. _Oh, bull's eye._  
"You know, my forefathers believed in a couple of gods, none of who really give a shit if you believe in _them_ or not. The gods don't give you hundreds of useless rules for life, either, and they don't have a concept for sin," I told her.  
It was almost amusing to see her fight the urge to go full John Cleese and scream 'blasphemy!' and start stoning me.  
"You wanna guess why those people really didn't need any of that shit?"  
She shook her head and silently ordered her cards around on her hand. A good listener, in any case.  
"'cause when you do fuck up, you're not harming the gods – they don't give a crap, like, they're above that, they're _gods_ – but you're harming other people. Other people will know that you fucked things up for them. And they'll let you know that you fucked up, and they won't let you forget. Those fuckers have a memory like a whole herd of elephants when you cross'em. That's fucking up with built-in punishment, right there. That's half of what kept people in line." I drew a card from the pile. "Simpler times, for the most part. Nowadays, you've got to do all the not-letting-yourself-forget yourself. Or you don't. No one really gives a fuck which is a different sort of punishment, I suppose."  
Sarai frowned at that, or at her cards, I couldn't tell.  
We played a few turns and Sarai laid out a beautiful nine-card run. I whistled.  
"What was the other half?" she suddenly asked, and clarified, "Of what kept people in line?"  
"Nookie," I said with a 'this was obvious-grin. "People wanna bang. Can't do that if you're banished from the village, unless you're fast enough to catch yourself a goat, or brave enough to try an elk."  
Sarai paled – surprising, really, that she could actually get any whiter – and laid down a card with a shaking hand. I chuckled and didn't tell her that I was just kidding.  
About the elk, at least.  
"Ain't too much fun, in the long run, if your nookie provider hates your guts 'cause you fucked up. A steady supply is the ultimate life goal, so you wanna toe the line to retain your access to warm and willing genitals of your choosing."  
"Your… Your ancestors were… interesting people," she said diplomatically.  
I laugh-snorted. "They were a bunch of inbred lunatics who lived in an ice box and got drunk on their own fermented piss. Not a single redeeming quality about them, but at least they were honest. Which explains a lot about me, I guess." I paused for effect. "Except that I don't drink my own piss. That's what Bud Light is for."  
She didn't even twitch. Man, what I wouldn't give for her to get that joke.  
 _Note to self: Get this girl a drink.  
_ "Were… uhm." She fell silent.  
"Out with it," I coaxed. This whole hesitant stuttering was getting on my nerves.  
"Were your parents also…"  
"Inbred?" I prompted and she blushed a little – a nice color for a change. "Ah-yup. Can't really avoid it when the next village is two hundred miles away and the only road is ten feet deep in snow. Second cousins or something. Not that critical, really, unless you add the centuries of inbreeding before that." I looked down on myself. "You gotta admit, I totally got-"  
Suddenly, the door opened and Mels came in. She stopped short when she saw me sitting there. "Oh, Mr _Sorensen_ ," she said and faked a smile. "I didn't know you were allowed in here. IC rooms are not usually open for-"  
"Is it time for my medication?" Sarai interrupted her, plainly surprising herself for speaking up like that.  
Mels blinked at her like an owl. "Uh, yes, actually." She proceeded to point out and hand over a couple of pills, which Sarai washed down with a glass of water, pushed some buttons on one of the machines that kept beeping every now and then, and fiddled with the curtains, with Sarai's pillows, then with the trolley.  
"Mr Sorensen, if I could speak to you for a minute? Outside?" she eventually said and looked at me expectantly.  
I waved my cards at her. "Can it wait? I'm winning." _Actually, I was having a fucking conversation._  
Sarai huffed some air through her nose.  
I swiveled my head to squint at her. "What?"  
She bit her lip and said nothing, though there was a suspicious twinkle in her eye that was difficult to look away from.  
"Actually, it is rather _urgent_." Mels said 'urgent' like stuck-up middle-aged white bitches said 'manager' in the sentence 'I want to speak with the manager.' "I would really-"  
Her phone started beeping an alarm sound at her from her pants pocket. She pulled it out, killed the alarm, huffed, turned and left the room without another word.  
I rolled my eyes. No doubt she wanted to know exactly why I hadn't called her back or fucked her again since coming back to El Paso yesterday, and she wanted to make up for that lost time. In the room right next door if necessary.  
"She is angry with you," Sarai pointed out the obvious.  
"Steady supply of nookie is still a relevant today," I groused. "Your turn."  
We played for a while. Sarai won because of course she did. I renewed my vow to switch to domino soon as I dealt for a rematch.  
"Did your family live in a small village?" Sarai broke the companionable silence first.  
"You remember I told you that I killed my mother, right?" I asked, looking straight at her. To her credit, she did not flinch this time. She nodded. "You sure you wanna go into family stories at this point? When you know how it's gonna end?"  
"Did… Your mother. Did you kill her because she… Did she also—"  
I waited, but she didn't manage to get the word out.  
"No, my mother didn't rape me." I paused and swallowed on a dry throat. "My sister did."  
I saw her shoulders slump and felt her big blue eyes on me. "But that's a story for another day," I waved her off, like I hadn't just casually told her something that had been the one secret of my life for more than 35 years.  
We played the rest of the round in silence. I won, but only because her eyelids started to droop toward the middle, no doubt due to the medicine. When I left the room, putting the stack of cards on the trolley next to the pills, she was already passed out.  
For some reason, seeing Mels making eyes at me from the front counter was a welcome sight. She followed me into her office readily and bent over her desk without too much fuss. She moaned into the crook of her arm to keep the volume down, which made me fuck her harder.  
Back at the motel, I sucked down several cans of Bud Light while I took a shower and calculated how many hours I had to kill before I could go back to Clearwood.  
I ended up going back four hours later and watched as Sarai fought her way out of druggy sleep, looking all of fourteen years old for a moment before the weight of the world settled onto her again.  
"Hello," she said tiredly and almost smiled.

/

 _ **Sarai**_

He taught me a game he said was called 'shithead'. I was fairly certain he was just saying it to provoke me. Privately, I called it 'Ohno', because it was a bit like Uno but more aggressively played, and played with normal cards instead of the brightly colored ones. I vowed to myself to, one day, find out the real name for this game.  
We played and he did not speak much except to give me starting instructions and comment on 'bum moves'.  
The way he gave me the opportunity to talk, without ever caring whether I took it or not, built a pressure in my head. When he collected the cards again and pointed out that visiting hours were coming to an end, I could not stand it any longer.  
"I did not try to kill myself," I burst out. He needed to know. I needed him to understand. "Last week. I did not mean to die."  
"But you wouldn't have minded if you had," Vike commented, then nodded to himself when I did not protest the assertion.  
"I simply..." I began, even though nothing about this was simple. My thoughts and conclusions were so convoluted and my words could not possibly capture either. Yet I had to try and explain myself.  
"I asked Doctor Gonzales about... rape."  
The doctor had been perplexed by my inquiry, I could tell. He had spoken about coercion and force, bodily autonomy and consent. All these big concepts were rooted in ideas that were not at all familiar or self-explanatory to me. So many basic words signified different things when other people used them.  
"Since then... There is this feeling within me that does not want to leave my head. An idea that I have done wrong, but in another... another life. Another world. And now I am in this world, I do not know how to redeem myself for those wrongdoings. I understand that it is all connected to pain, so I attempted to... compensate in equal measure."  
Viking merely watched me and did not offer any guidance or opinion.  
"Physical activity causes me pain. My legs, my- my whole body is so weak. The therapist said I was to exercise daily. I simply added nightly exercise..." And then, that third night, everything had gone dark.  
Still, there was no reaction from my opposite. He did not care whether I spoke or not. It should feel freeing, but instead it chafed.  
"At the commune, retribution for wrongdoings could be made with lashings or exclusion from activities, or by denying food and water for a time, and with prayer in isolation. But here, I just do not know, what I..." The words fought against me, so I finished awkwardly, "I do not know how to become... forgiven."  
"You won't."  
Just like that, I was broken. My heart seemed to plummet in my chest.  
"Real life don't work that way," Vike explained lightly. "There's no tit-for-tat that magically makes your fuck-ups and atrocities disappear. Jesus don't really wash your sins away. The shit you do is permanent. Accountability is a cold-hearted bitch, but at least she's fair that way."  
"What can I do?" I whispered, shaking. I gasped for air but could not breathe. I felt… dirty.  
"Nothing," he answered, confirming my worst fears. "In the real world, what you do is, you try to get your head around what you did and why you did it… or you don't. And then you live with that knowledge about yourself… or you don't."  
That sounded worse than any beating I had accepted, worse any starvation and thirst I had endured. It sounded like an endless and unrelenting hell. The stabbing ache in my head heralded the tears.  
"Hurting or even killing yourself ain't gonna make a lick of difference, that's for sure," he kept on. "Neither will crying about it, by the way."  
I inhaled deeply to try and suppress the tears that already blurred my vision.  
Vike gave a sigh. "But if you feel like you _have_ to do one of those three things, then have yourself a cry and be done with it."  
Hiccupping, I looked at him in confusion. He looked back at me and his eyes were blue and sincere.  
He shrugged one shoulder and casually collected the cards of the game I had long forgotten. "Go ahead. Cry your eyes out. Was too long time coming, anyway. You sure as shit have plenty good reasons to bawl. Might as well have yourself a sobfest and get it all out of your system. Who knows, maybe you'll feel better in the end?"  
I could feel the tears rising in my chest, up through my tightening windpipe, and I had no levees to set against them anymore.  
I had abused and… raped and killed.  
I had been deluded, exploited, abused, raped and almost killed, and robbed of a childhood worth remembering, one safe and sound enough to build a life upon.  
There was no such thing as redemption or justice in this world. All the pain I had endured and inflicted upon myself had been in vain.  
My body would forever be weak and marked, and so would my soul. I would forever be stained with what I had done and what had been done to me. I would never bear children.  
I was less than nothing. Made of nothing but irredeemable sin and shame.  
I had less than nothing to my name. The bed I lay in, the name I carried, even the most vital pint of the blood in my veins was not mine. All my memories were tainted. I had no family, no friends, no prophet nor saint, no god by my side, no future that held any meaning.  
Only a man who had given me painful truths and wanted nothing in return other than me hearing them.  
He had had no reason to bring me here, none to sit and talk and play cards and listen to music with me, none to come back for me.  
And no reason to stay.  
"Do not leave me," I gasped in panic at the realization, and my shaking voice rose at the end to make it a question.  
"Yeah, still not taking orders from you," Vike retorted.  
My heart hurt worse than it had that night I had collapsed on the floor, so much I moaned in pain and grasped at my chest, sure that it was bleeding. The machine behind me gave a shrill beep.  
Vike huffed theatrically. "Calm down. I wasn't going anywhere in the first place." He crossed his arms in front of his chest. "After all the crap we've already been through, you think a few tears are gonna scare me away? Get fuckin' real, sugarbun."  
The relief made me gasp, and all at once, fat, hot tears streaked down my cheeks. So I hung my pounding, aching head, closed my eyes, covered my face with my hands and cried.  
I cried for what had to be hours, until I slipped into an exhausted sleep in spite of the headache.  
Once, very shortly, I thought I felt a hand squeeze mine.  
When I next woke up, it was light outside. Dawn. I was alone. His set of cards was stacked on the trolley next to my pills.  
The realizations I had come to still weighed impossibly heavy on me, my own memories cut and bruised as deeply as they had before, nothing was different.  
Except me.

/

 _ **Viking  
**_  
We were just playing dominos (She was winning. I was quickly running out of games I could safely play with her.) when it came to me.  
 _She'll be alright._  
After twenty years of wading through shit that merely changed in depth and stench, after finally breaking down and crying her eyes out when I had hit her in the nuts with the redemption thing, _she would be alright_. There was no denying now that she would pull through, rebuild herself shiny and new – break down crying a couple more times and hate me for lying to her about that 'one and done'-bit – and eventually even jury-rig her own brand of salvation, I'd bet my cut on it. It'd be uphill the whole way from here to the end, but she'd make it. With or without me.  
 _That means you can finally piss off and come home for good._  
I rubbed the bridge of my nose and muttered "fuck" to myself.  
"Are you okay?" she asked and looked at me with her big blue eyes.  
"Peachy," I replied. "Need a coffee and a smoke."  
"Are you worried about your niece?" she asked.  
Halfway through the last game, I had got a facetime from the VP's phone. I'd been certain I'd be called back to the MC for business. I had already lined up a couple of good excuses to put my return off just another day or two.  
But the caller turned out to be Harper, with her face still full of red dots that were already scabbing over. Judging by her loud voice and the fact that she was cackling like a madwoman as she ran away from her dad whose phone she had kidnapped, she'd be a 100% again in no time. The bunch would soon be coming out of their quarantine.  
The VP would be back in the game and before long I'd have to get my ass back to Austin.  
"Nah," I said. "She's fine."  
"Is she your sister's daughter?"  
I snorted. "Fuck no." I couldn't think of any two people less alike than Harper and Aletta.  
 _Must've been fifteen years since I last thought of that name._ I shoved the thought away.  
"Did your parents have many children, then?"  
"Just my older sister and me. My brothers are all MC brothers, no genetic relation." I slapped my stomach, grinning broadly. "I'm the only purebred viking in the club. And the only ginger dude, too. You're a lucky bitch!"  
She bit her lip and lay down a stone that didn't help me at all.  
I fucking hated that. Both the stone and her holding back. I groaned, frustrated.  
"So. What's the deal with all that family-related curiosity?" I asked and tried not to sound too much like I was accusing her of pumping me for personal information for nefarious purposes.  
She took a moment before she answered, "I grew up surrounded by many people – children and grown-ups alike. So many that I can barely recall names or faces. Before I was chosen and... became part of the... spiritual service-" I rolled my eyes at that euphemism but didn't comment. "-I suppose I was... My life was very much like that of little Harper. Countless siblings… sisters. Caretakers, elder sisters, preachers. Much… not chaos, exactly, but activity."  
During Harper's short call, Sarai had heard the commotion in the background. Becky and Maya were wailing like police sirens for reasons only five-year-olds could explain while Grace and Jake were fighting about whatever, as usual. Griffin probably slept through it like a boss. Lilah and Ky were trying to keep a cool head through it all, one of them more successfully than the other. And Harper was Harper. The result was a noisy mess. Sometimes I envied the VP.  
"In theory, it should have been a childhood equal to the ones you have shown me on your phone. The ones of your nieces and nephews." Sarai's eyes went distant for a second as she no doubt remembered the photos and videos of kids and grown-ups doing shit and having fun together. "However, in practice, it was so very different, even before I— It... made me wonder. About families and fathers and mothers."  
"Lemme tell you something about families," I said when she turned out to be too shy to ask for anything more specific – or maybe she was just clever enough to know I'd keep blabbing if she let me. Maybe a bit of both. "They can be big or small, broken or whole, two or three or four generations, religious or not, located in Texas, or thirty miles from civilization out in a forest of the Pacific Northwest, or in fucking Timbuktu… Don't matter. Nine outta ten times, they fuck up the kids."  
Sarai panicked a little at that information. "You mean to say— Eight others have experienced what I have?"  
"Nah, I _do not mean to say_ that." I was aware of how close to blatantly lying I was. "Your past is fifty-one shades of shit. Sad thing is, kids can be fucked up in more ways than one or two."  
She lowered her hands, the dominos forgotten, her imagination no doubt running at full speed, right into that darkness where she lived and coming up with countless more ways of ruining innocent lives.  
In my experience, things were much more banal than that, though.  
"Moms, dads, grown-ups, even older siblings…. They are like gods when we're young. Can't resist them. Their words are gospel, it's coded into our monkey brains, there's no escaping it. Everything they do and don't do. Every word they say or don't. The fucking way they look at you or look away." I sucked my teeth remembering that feeling of not being looked at. "All of it shapes you like so much fucking play-doh, whether you want to or not." I sighed and scratched my forehead. "And sometimes they just really, really fuck you up."  
"So a child should rather grow up in a small family?" Sarai asked. "So that the negative influence is limited?"  
I laughed somewhat bitterly. "If only it was that easy. Numbers don't really have anything to do with it. You commune kids were, what, dozens? The vagina goblins at the MC and their parents are sixteen strong by now, and counting. One of those groups is doing a-okay."  
I didn't comment on the other group. No need to be fucking rude.  
I leaned back in my chair and opened my fat mouth and out came, "I got the opposite end of that stick. I grew up knowing exactly three people in the whole world until I was 12 years old. Still managed to become supremely fucked up." _Might've been the company's fault._  
Her eyebrows went up at that. "Only three people!" She paused, then almost whispered, "Judah also grew up in isolation, with his brother, his scholar and his uncle his only contacts."  
The urge to grimace was too much. Being compared to Prophet Douchecanoe or his rat of a twin brother was definitely below the belt. Yeah, I was a fucking monster and a psycho, but even I had standards. "Makin' my point for me, then, eh?"  
Sarai didn't seem to understand yet just how massive a mass-murdering, kiddie-fiddling fucking asshole her beloved Judah had been, or that he was worse than her mother by several orders of magnitude. _I'd put that on a to-do-list if I had any intention of hanging around._  
"Did you grow up in the place of your ancestors, then?" she asked. "In the, uhm, ice-box? Miles away from the next village?"  
"In Norway? Nope. I was born on American soil. I'm as American as a bald eagle choking on a BigMac. Mother was first generation immigrant. Her parents were both from Norway. Dad was pure Norwegian, came over for her when he was sixteen."  
 _Why am I telling you this?_ I asked her silently, and answered my own question.  
 _You want her to know.  
You fucking idiot.  
_I cleared my throat. "Let's not go down that rabbit hole. I ain't nearly drunk enough for this story."  
She tilted her head. "I do not understand. What do rabbits have to do with it?"  
Ah, fuck. This bitch had never heard of Alice in Wonderland. Another item on the to-do-list that would never be.  
"It's an expression," I explained to her like I might explain to Harper. "Rabbit holes are deep and tricky. So when you go down one, you won't get out of it again so easy. It's dark down there, full o' rabbits and shit, and you'll get lost. Not a good place to go. Place to stay the fuck away from, if at all possible."  
"A rabbit hole," Sarai repeated to herself, as if the concept was a revelation. "So that is the word for it."  
"For what?" I asked.  
"My life," she said, sounding weirdly relieved.  
Yeah, I had nothing.  
She fixed her blue eyes on me and offered, "If you… If you ever feel the need to visit your rabbit hole, I, uh—I would accompany you. So you do not get lost."  
The sincerity was killing me. I opened my mouth to say something stupid, but at that second, Mels and one of the nurses came barging through the door and took Sarai, bed and all, to some examination room.  
I got out of there before Mels could pull me aside, went to a bar, got drunk and picked a fight with a fat Mexican who I christened Pedro. Pedro was out like a light after one too many punches in his face, drunk off his ass just like me, and didn't speak any English beyond the essential vocab ('beer', 'now', 'asshole'), so I sat with his unconscious body in the alley behind the bar, smoked half a pack, got even drunker with the help of my friend Bacardi, and went down my rabbit hole with him. Just to see if I had the words for it, and the memory to make a narrative out of a mess, and the balls. To see if I could.  
I could.  
Barely.

/

 **TBC**


	12. Chapter 11

_**Viking**_

"You shouldn't expect her to come out of it before tomorrow," Mels told me with the most professional smile.  
I looked from her to the other nurse – Villanueva – and from her to the security guy whose name tag said 'Guy' and who looked like he ate whole cows for breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner _and_ supper. He'd stepped a bit closer when I had _very_ politely inquired where the fuck Sarai was – her room was empty, bed and bitch gone – and why the fuck I couldn't see her today and what the fuck had happened and why no one had thought to fucking call me.  
"These drug interactions aren't common at all, and your wife's case is challenging to start with. We can assure you that she is in good hands," Nurse Villanueva lectured me with all the warmth and consideration of a discount handjob.  
None of the Clearwood staff was my fan, with the possible exception of Mels, who loved my cock, and Doctor McGowan, who got a big ol' professional boner for the 'unusual and challenging patient' that paid really fucking well. I wasn't part of the normal, well-combed, rich white upper-crust clientele. I talked too loud, said 'fuck' too quickly, and hung around too often. I suspected those bitches also wondered why a young, pretty chick like Sarai would be married to a hulking dude pushing forty-five. More than one of them had that look in their eyes that said they believed exactly no part of the Mexican thug kidnapping story and were instead sure that I had mauled Sarai personally and then turned chicken just before I would've finished her off.  
I didn't give a shit about any of that, before now. Now, Sarai was MIA and drugged to the gills and these cunts didn't want to tell me where she was and didn't want to let me see her.  
"How about we go to my office and discuss further steps?" Mels suggested.  
I gritted my teeth and followed. "What the fuck is going on!?" I barked at her the second the door shut behind her.  
The We're-Gonna-Bang-eyes rolled and immediately lost their shine. Good. I was more likely to grab her by both ankles and dangle her out the window right now.  
"That's the shit that happens when you treat a patient without proper access to their medical history," she bitched and crossed her arms. "Also, you signed several waivers, which makes it perfectly legal for our medical professionals to make these sorts of decisions without you. And as to the 'why wasn't I informed': It's mostly because you're not answering your phone or calling anyone back." She glared at me.  
I didn't fucking care that she had a point. I was fucking pissed.  
I didn't fucking like it when plans changed, that was all.  
"Now… how about I help you calm down a bit?" Mels asked and took her top off. She was wearing a lacey dark-red bra with little patterns that practically pointed to her nipples.  
"Used my last condom yesterday," I said, too pissed off to even think about fucking this woman.  
"We can totally go bare, if you want. I'm clean and I'm on the pill," she said as she stuck a hand down her pants to fondle herself. Seeing my dark look, she shrugged and tried to seem nonchalant. "Or, you know, I could blow you. You know I don't have a gag reflex."  
I didn't even consider it before walking out on her. She squawked and tried to hide out of sight from the corridor when I pulled the door open – all the way so the handle left a very satisfying hole in the wall. There. One of us banged, after all.  
"The second she wakes up, or gets worse, or I can go in and see her, you fucking call me. Got that?" I glared at the nurses at the front station. They made googly eyes at me but nodded. Guy shot me a 'oi, calm down there, pal'-look from his position by the wall but wisely didn't talk to or keep me from walking out onto the parking lot.  
Too bad there were no more Nazis in Texas. I could've used a couple of them right about then.  
 _ **  
**_/

 _ **Sarai  
**_  
"Sarai."  
"This has to be done." _This is what you have been  
waiting for _"her own good." _  
for so long "and hard"  
my princess _"open your mouth."  
"I am-" _so scared_ "ready."  
Smile. Smile. Keep smiling.  
"Ready. Watch out."  
Too hot.  
"Sarai, calm down."  
 _It hurts it hurts it hurts._  
"Look at me." little girl. _My little princess._  
Judah. I love _you would kill for me, no? You would die for me._  
You're so beautiful when you smile.  
"Hold still." _Stop crying.  
I would.  
_"Hold her" _open_ "down."  
Fake it until it becomes real, then.  
 _Hurts. Hurts.  
_ "I know." " _That is how it is supposed to be._ "  
"Look at me."  
It is already in your nature.  
 _Where are my eyes?  
_ "Who are you?"  
"Sarai?"  
"Don't touch-" _me_ "her!"  
"You are making this worse."  
"We will repeat the process until you learn to-" _Be a good girl now._  
"Step away, please."  
 _Please. Pleased. I am very_ " _-pleased with her. Her awakening-_ "  
"Sarai, look at me."  
"I shall see her again. Many times."  
"I'm not going anywhere."  
"Please-" _Make it stop it hurts.  
"You like this, do you not? Such a good girl."  
I love you_ are hurting me _  
_The world ambushed my senses and buried me. I wanted to whimper but there was tightness in my chest and throat and no sound came out.  
"Breathe," he said. "Breathe. You're alright."  
I anchored myself to that voice before I could even attach it to a name or a face.  
"Where the fuck is that goddamn call button?!"  
Though I had no idea who he was, I know his anger was not directed at me. He was angry on my behalf.  
No one had ever been angry on my behalf.  
"I can get someone to give you some more painkillers, but you'll have to let go of my hand."  
He might as well have told me I had to let go of my heartbeat.  
"Alright. I'll take that as a 'no'." Under his breath, he murmured, "Fanfuckingtastic. Alright, then." Some shuffling and a scraping of metal on the floor. "Man, I need a fucking smoke, though."  
Ulfr. Or Viking. Or Vike. _Or Asshole._ His hair was red, his beard even redder, his eyes were blue, his nose was crooked because it had been broken in combat on a farm far away from civilization – he had said something about a tank and a bull in the sticks – and he had a big silver tooth that showed up so often. I remembered him without ever having forgotten him.  
My surroundings filtered through the noise. I was cold. The steady beep of machines drilled into my ears. Something was sitting on my chest, and there was a familiar stinging in my abdomen.  
"This shit is really putting a crimp in my plans, sugarbun," he said, pulling my attention out of my own body. I tilted my head to see him properly. My face was caught in a contraption that made it impossible to turn my face towards him without considerable effort. He was a blur. My eyes felt like stones in my head.  
"I woulda been home for half a day already. But no. Sugar has to have a meltdown outta nowhere."  
 _Meltdown?_ I wanted to ask, but my mouth was full. _Home?_ My throat was full. I gagged and a machine behind me gave two shrill beeps as something seeped down my nostrils. I tried to lift my hands to my face but could not. My arms were bound.  
My right hand was in his, or rather, his hand was in my right one. His grasp momentarily tightened so that I could finally feel it. His skin was rough and cool to the touch.  
I breathed deeply. Many moments passed in which I did nothing but breathe.  
"I've wanted to walk out of this fucking place and this city for weeks now. Woulda been perfect. You were only supposed to get fuckin' better from here, sugarbun. All by yourself cause _you're a strong independent bitch who don't need no man!_ " He crowed that last sentence like it was a catchphrase. I was not familiar with it. He noticed and sighed, "One day you're gonna get all the references, I swear."  
 _What happened?_ I tried to move my lips but there was hard plastic between them, stretching them.  
"They gave you some drugs that didn't get along with the other drugs, and then you freaked the fuck out and got a bad fever and then collapsed a lung or whatever. They intubated you. You ripped that thing out and hurt yourself because that's the wack type of shit that you do. They are fed the fuck up with you now, though. Brought out the big guns."  
 _Guns?_ Was I going to get shot?  
"Just an expression, calm down. I mean they put that tube back in, tied you to the fucking bed so you won't pull it out again, and gave you the _really_ good drugs that made you trip balls for a couple hours. So I guess this is the Clearwood version of rock bottom."  
I tried to process this. The last thing I remembered clearly was talking to Viking about… rabbits? _Why had we been talking about rabbits?  
_ And I remembered Judah with one hand in my hair and one hand around my throat and his—his— in my—  
Machines beeped shrilly. Something in my chest cramped painfully.  
"Sarai, stop it. Seriously, I'm gonna get a nurse. You can let go."  
I strained to move my head from side to side vigorously. _No no no no._  
"Fuck," he huffed, annoyed. "Well, then you gotta calm down for me. Sarai. Hey, look at me."  
His other hand settled on my forehead. It was so big it seemed to cover my whole head, from the crown to my eyebrows.  
"Knock. It. Off." He emphasized every word. "Look at me."  
I did. I really did. I looked my fill and tried to capture him in my mind like a photograph.  
"Calm down. Breathe."  
His skin was cold against mine.  
 _Do not go away._  
"I'm not going anywhere. But just so you know, you'd be fine on your own." He pulled his hand away from my face. A colder imprint remained, like a ghost's touch.  
 _I have never been on my own.  
_ "Look, I'm gonna sit down here-" He sat, presumably on a chair next to my bed, and mostly vanished from my field of vision unless I craned my neck. "-and put on some music. No offense, but you're a shit conversationalist right now."  
 _Led Zeppelin,_ _one of the greatest, uhm, bands in the history of music_ _?  
_ "I think the situation calls for something slightly more … dreamy than Led Zep."  
He played a song that was called 'Shine on, you crazy diamond'. It went on and on and on, or maybe he simply played it on loop. I slipped in and out of sleep, but that song was always there, and so were his fingers, wrapped in mine.

/

 _ **Viking  
**_  
When I was a kid, a cougar came to our cabin. It was the middle of the day, so seeing a cougar was really unusual, and even in the dark they usually stayed far away from anything that smelled of humans – and our hut must've been rank with people smell. Plus, my mom had often doused the trees and bushes with deer piss to drive animals away from her vegetables.  
I remembered staring at the big cat through the glass, seeing it sniff through our tools and leftovers, thinking how powerful it looked. Stout and solid of body, with huge flanks and paws and thick legs and neck, and that tail like a fluffy baseball bat. 150 pounds of pure deadly strength.  
And then it lifted and swung its head around to look straight at me, and I saw that its lower jaw was missing. Bits of bone, muscle and jagged cartilage stuck out into the empty air. Its upper tusks and tattered tongue stood out against the bloody hole where the jaw had been ripped off. The fur on the cat's throat and chest was completely painted red.  
The cougar looked at me, blinked slowly as if bored, returned to sniffing around for a couple of minutes and then walked back into the forest at a leisurely pace.  
For some reason, seeing Sarai fighting against the nurses yesterday and lying here with plastic going into her open mouth made me think of that incident I hadn't thought about in 35 years. Something about a fierce mind trapped in a body that was originally primed for life and survival but now, through no fault of her own, failed her.  
Or maybe it was just the sight of blood spattering her chin and throat when she violently coughed up the plastic tube and bit one of the nurses in the finger, breaking the rubber glove and the skin underneath, with a feral snarl.  
"You're definitely more of a kitty cat than a cougar," I mused aloud at her. She was sleeping, I could tell because her fingers went slack every time she fell asleep and then twitched when she came back up after about thirty minutes.  
Sleeping, even with the plastic tubes, she looked 15 years max. Kitty, for sure.  
"Then again… give it forty more years and you'll probably have the young one's hanging off your sweet ass like so many suckerfish on a fish tank glass pane."  
She didn't answer, but I could easily imagine how she would look at me, with that disgusted horror she did so well.  
"No, seriously," I assured her. "You've got the kind of ass that'll age like fine wine. You can believe me, I know my way around asses. Saw yours and immediately knew what's up. The nickname came naturally."  
She wouldn't be embarrassed so much as incredulous that bawdiness of that immensity was allowed to exist in this world. I grinned.  
"I'd get you some proper food. It'd all run to fat in all the right places. Then you'd wear some yoga pants, and voilá – natural twerking champion in no time." She wouldn't know twerking, or proper food, and she'd probably never worn yoga pants in her life. I sighed. "So much to learn you have, young padawan," I grated in my best Yoda imitation, then realized that she wouldn't know Yoda either and groaned.  
She was like a freshly hatched chicken, or an alien that had come to Earth. Twenty years old, zero days of actual life under her belt.  
"The world would blow your fucking mind if you just let it."  
It had been much the same for me, but I had at least known the basics, and I hadn't been hostile toward the world. Sarai was pretty much a blank slate, except for the fanatical aversion against anything 'ungodly', which was… everything there was.  
 _Shame that she won't ever leave the asylum_ , AK remarked in my head.  
I looked at her, all ninety pounds of her tied to the bed like a homicidal convict waiting for the death penalty by lethal injection.  
Yeah, she was a loose cannon, and her brain was clinically proven to be wired wrong, but it still seemed like a bad joke that she would stay here, or some institution quite like this one, while I would get on my bike and ride into the sunset.  
A bad joke I had heard before. The punch line had seemed funnier last time.  
I flashed back for half a second. I fucking hated it.  
Sarai huffed through her nose and tilted her head oddly to be able to see me. Her fingers twitched against mine. She pulled her hand out of mine, then set the tip of her index finger against my palm and drew a few lines on it. It took me a second to understand that she was writing words on my skin.  
k-e-e-p-t-a-l-k-i-n-g  
I paused and put the words together, then shot her an are-you-fucking-kidding- look. She blinked back at me.  
"Firstly, how long have you already been awake, you cheeky thing?" Pun intended. "And secondly, you're _really_ not getting that thing with me and you and ordering me around, are you?"  
p-l-e-a-s-e, she added with her ticklish index finger and I snorted. "Too little, too late."  
She grabbed my fingers and squeezed with all her might, which wasn't much right about now.  
I settled comfortably into my chair and smirked at her. "You know, usually everyone just tells me to shut the fuck up. This is a change of pace I could totally get used to." I enjoyed the moment. "So. Which fairy tale do you want to hear today, kids?"  
Sarai put her finger against my palm and hesitated a moment before she wrote y-o-u-r-s-t-o-r-y _._  
"My story?" I asked. I had plenty of stories. Most of them featured my massive cock, though, and while I never tired of talking about that, I wasn't sure Sarai was the right audience for it right now. Regardless, I had some puns about _long_ stories with _deep_ meanings and _rising_ action already lined up when she carved onto my palm again.  
r-a-b-b-i-t-h-o-l-e, she wrote, as if she knew that I was already there, already in it with one foot. That I had been dreaming about it at night and daydreaming during the day when my thoughts strayed. The memories, like the one about the cougar, kept coming up in small bursts like they hadn't in three fucking decades.  
" _That_ old yarn," I scoffed. She probably felt that my fingers had gone cold. "Third time's the charm asking for it, eh?"  
I-a-m-h-e-r-e, she wrote.  
I snorted. "Not going anywhere, are you?" I mocked with a pointed look at the solid plastic ties that shackled her to the bed.  
I-a-m-h-e-r-e, she wrote again and grasped my fingers.  
I could feel myself caving. I was fucking tired of having this on the forefront of my brain anyway.  
 _Might as well,_ I argued. _Won't make a difference._  
Sarai would never get out of here and I would be gone as soon as she was back to normal – whatever 'normal' looked like in her universe. She'd take the story to her grave.  
Maybe this was best done like in ancient Persia: Once drunk (with a guy called Pedro), once (mostly) sober, and then the matter would be gone. Settled.  
Maybe it was just time for this stupid fucking story to have its day, and then die.  
We were still holding hands, but after a while, it was definitely more her holding mine than the other way around.

/

 _ **Ulfr**_

We lived in a cabin in a valley of the Cascade Range in western Oregon, way back before all of that stuff was made into National Forests and National Parks and got mapped out with roads you hardly even need 4-wheel-drive for any more. Until I was around six years old and saw my first-ever newspaper, with grainy pictures in it, I really thought we were the only people on the planet. Never thought anything of it, either.  
My father was at least seven feet tall and cut down trees for a living. He would be gone for four days, camp far out at the foot of the mountains, and then come home for three. He would kill, skin, dress and cut up the animals he hunted. He taught me and my sister how to use guns, knives, tools. We had a diesel generator, for water-heating, and additional heating in bad winters and additional cooling in hot summers, which he taught us how to maintain. He knew hundreds of card games, and how to distill alcohol, and how to make a fire that burnt for days.  
He was a god.  
My mother's name was Sigrun. That's a valkyrie's name, and my mother was one of them. She was tall, strong and fearless and had red hair all the way down her back. She built and kept the house, tilled the land around it whenever the frost allowed it, and defended both against animals of all sizes. She could use all the weapons pappa could and kept the ones he left behind during a trip in pristine condition. She cooked and baked and made clothes from natural fibers and animal skins. She would sing Norwegian folk songs the whole day and sing me to sleep with English lullabies.  
She was my mother.  
My sister was – is – Aletta. She was – is – two or three years older than I. We never had birthdays. We never learned Norwegian. My earliest memory of her is of her breaking my pinky finger until the skin split, just to see what it looked like inside. She was the one who taught me how to read and write, and the one who would show me how to catch squirrels, and then bash their heads in with a rock. With mother and pappa at work, Aletta and I spent almost every day together.  
Aletta was tall and pretty like mother.  
She hated mother. She loved pappa.  
Not like pappa loved her.  
When I was maybe six years old, pappa had an accident. He fell and dashed his head against something. After that, he couldn't talk any more. He moved slowly. He drooled and pissed and shat himself. He lost weight until he wasn't recognizable. He was hardly even a person.  
Mother and Aletta and I took care of him. Kept him alive for six or seven seasons even though I could tell that he wanted to go, and he hated us for not letting him, and hated himself for being too weak to get the job done. I think mother also hated him for being this burden on her and us. We didn't get to eat regularly those years because there wasn't enough time to hunt and harvest and keep up with the cabin. All of us got sick from eating spoilt food. Mother started to look very old.  
One day in winter, I woke up and pappa lay outside, face-down in the snow.  
Mother took his body into the forest. She didn't bury him because the ground was frozen solid. She wasn't gone long enough for a cremation. I think she cut him up and left the parts for the animals, or maybe she threw him into the river.  
After that, everything changed. Now mother would go work and hunt for weeks at a time, like pappa used to. Aletta and I were home alone. After a while, Aletta also left the cabin to hunt. When I asked if I could come with, she would hit me. She liked to bash my legs with a thick piece of wood until I couldn't walk and then act like a nurse, patching me up and prescribing bed rest. Like she was a savior or something.  
I was too young to know that she was insane.  
One day, mother and Aletta and I were all at the cabin. We were eating dinner. Everything was… normal. And then Aletta asked mother why she had killed pappa.  
"I know you did it," she said. "I just want to know why. Is it because pappa kissed me and wanted to make babies with me?"  
Mother got up and hit Aletta across the face with a wooden spoon. Hard enough to break her cheekbone and give her a black eye. Aletta kicked mother in the stomach so she puked the dinner back up. Both of them left that day and didn't come back for weeks. I couldn't walk properly because Aletta had broken my foot. I almost starved, and cried like a baby when Aletta finally came back.  
Aletta told me that mother had killed pappa because she was jealous, because she, Aletta, and pappa had fallen in love. Mother had noticed and gone after pappa, bashed his head in, and then punished him by keeping him alive for years before finally killing him that winter night.  
When mother came back, after almost a whole season, I asked her if that was true.  
It was the only time she thrashed me, too. I was sick in bed for almost a month. She'd broken a couple of my ribs and given me a concussion that made me see double and made me so dizzy I couldn't even stand upright.  
After that, Aletta and I made elaborate plans to kill our mother.  
Every free second, we would talk about how we would do it.  
Aletta knew that mother was too strong for either of us alone to take her down, so I was essential to the plan. She often took my cock into her mouth to make sure I remembered which team I was on.  
I liked it when she did that. It felt funny but good.  
Then one day, I took a brick and hit mother over the head with it while she was sitting outside cleaning tools. She bled so much I thought I had broken her skull and killed her.  
I remember that I was so relieved for a second. It had been quick and then it was over. Mother was some sort of final boss in a game, and I had defeated her with one blow.  
But Aletta came and told me that she was still alive.  
We tied her up with rope and pulled her to the shed. Our cabin had an old outhouse that pappa turned into a storage shed after he installed a proper septic tank; that was years before even Aletta was born. He'd told me about the time he dug up the shit that had gone into it and used it as manure, leaving a clean-ish eight foot deep hole. He'd covered that hole up without refilling it, thinking that it might be useful, in case the tank was ever compromised.  
Aletta and I strung mother up on a wood beam just above that hole which we uncovered, around the waist with her hands tied behind her back like a hog.  
We left her hanging there for at least two days and nights. Her fingers went black with frostbite. Her skin bled from chafing and then got infected. She pissed blood because Aletta and I would beat her with hammers and with sticks like a piñata.  
She never cried. She also never confessed that she had killed pappa, at least not to me. Aletta said she confessed it to her every time she went to see her and begged her for mercy.  
Eventually, I thought mother had died because she had gone entirely still, so I cut her down. She fell into the hole. I noticed she was still twitching. So I went and grabbed one of the gas cans for our diesel generator, doused her with it, and lit her on fire.  
Burning human flesh smells just like pork.  
The night after, Aletta and I killed a bottle of alcohol she had found under some floorboards. Like some sort of celebration.  
But really, my sister was furious that I had killed mother so quickly, and without her there. She didn't say right away, because I was growing taller and stronger than her and I would hit her back if she hit me. So she instead she got her revenge in other ways. First, she poisoned the food and water, which gave me stomach cramps and diarrhea, then locked me up in the toilet. I was in there for days. She didn't let me out. She didn't let me eat or drink or sleep. She would bang on the door and the roof. Eventually, I was just too weak.  
When I asked her what she wanted me to do and how I could make it up to her, she said I needed to put a baby in her.  
I hadn't had any sex ed. I had no idea how to do that. She said she'd show me.  
She got me out of the toilet, led me to the bed that once belonged to our father, and rode me.  
She kept me in that bed for weeks. Tied me to the bedframe so I wouldn't leave. Fed me, washed me, walked me every now and then with my hands and feet tied together with belts, and fucked me until I was raw.  
One day, while she was out hunting, one of the ties broke. I got a hand free, freed myself, packed up a few things and ran, as fast as my atrophied muscles allowed. I didn't even know exactly where I was running. I had taken one of the knives with me, just in case I ran into Aletta.  
Eventually, I hit a logging road that led to a small town. Some people picked me up, got me to the doctor and the sheriff. I knew what a sheriff did from the few books I'd read. He locked up murderers forever.  
I didn't want to be locked up forever. Not again.  
So I lied to him and told the whole story like Aletta killed mother all by herself. I had the skeletal look and the marks around my wrists and ankles to prove that my sister had held me captive, so they were inclined to believe me. Or maybe my family was somewhat of a local tale already, the Weirdosens everybody in town gossiped about, all animal sacrifice, drugs, incest and skinning people alive for walking in the forest. I only ever gave one report and they took it as gospel truth.  
I don't know what exactly happened after that. If the police and the rangers went up to the cabin and found Aletta there, or if they had to bring her down like a rabid wildcat. I still wonder if Aletta went with them willingly, or if she tried to hold the cabin like a fortress. If she ever confessed to anything or if she accused me.  
In any case, I went into state care, foster home 1 through to 7, school, and from there onto the streets, down along the coast with the Amtrak and then eastwards from LA, into the bars, onto a bike. Aletta went to some juvenile detention center or something.  
When I turned 16, I researched what had happened to her one time while I was in Oregon again to get some papers from a records department or something. The story had briefly been in the newspapers. They'd put her into a closed institution in Washington State where they keep her in a padded room because she tries to bash her own head in all the time.  
I went to see her once, years after that. Looked at her through the little window in the door like one would look at a beast in a zoo.  
I know she recognized me.  
I laughed at her and left.

/

 **TBC**


	13. Chapter 12

_**Viking**_

Sarai's thumb went back and forth, back and forth over the skin on the back of my hand.  
"Aletta hated being laughed at. Or laughing in general. Just hated the sound."  
 _"Stop laughing."_  
I could hear her voice echoing in my head to this day. She started out softly, with a sad plea,  
" _Stop laughing_!"  
then quickly got louder, more insistent, harder, sharper.  
 _"Stop! Laughing!"_  
Like jabs with a hot poker.  
" _STOP LAUGHING!_ "  
A shrill screech, accompanied by a physical blow.  
 _"STOP YOUR LAUGHING! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!"  
_ "I've got that in my DNA," I said, referring to the insanity that had my sister's voice and face.  
I breathed in and out. Fuck, I was sweating. "I have no idea how many people I kissed and fucked, but number one will always be my own sister. I long lost count of the people I killed, but number one will always be my own momma."  
I tried to think back, but there was nothing to be found. "For the fucking life of me, I don't remember why I thought killing my mother was perfectly fine. Just for whaling on me that one time? And killing her _like that_. The outhouse hole was my idea, not Aletta's. Aletta just wanted to tie her to a tree but I talked her out of it. Told her that she'd die too quick out in the open."  
I remembered us arguing with a puddle of mother's blood between us. I remembered Aletta screeching and slapping me in the face, and me slapping her right back.  
"Charitable minds might think I wanted to save my mother's life that way, because she'd surely die outside but would have a chance in the shed. But I was – am – a fucking monster, and I think I just wanted to make sure she suffered a good, long time."  
By the way the pad of her thumb kept sweeping over the back of my hand I knew that Sarai was awake and listening. Had been the whole time. Fearless bitch.  
"I can't even remember exactly what I might've thought she should suffer for. For whaling on my ass that one time I had asked if her beloved husband-turned-invalid and her sociopathic daughter were really fucking each other? I can't even remember if I ever believed Aletta's version of events. Don't think I did. I knew Aletta was a pathological liar, even if I didn't know the word for that yet. Even if I had believed her, I can't have moved me much. I didn't know anything about sex back then, so the whole concept held zero meaning to me. I didn't know that you don't get to have it with your own underage offspring, or that it counts as insane when you want it from your dad. Also, I didn't understand jealousy and envy when it came to people. Food? Yes. Toys? Hell yeah. Being able to do something better, faster, more efficiently? Absolutely. But people? Attention, feelings, affection, all that bullshit? I didn't get it."  
 _Still don't_ , I thought.  
"Funniest shit, though," I said humorlessly. "To go see her there, all bound and locked up like a homicidal criminal, when I had just went with my pals from the Nevada chapter and gunned down an entire biker bar the day before. Out of the two of us, Aletta was definitely the least insane but she stayed in that cell and I got to leave. Funny shit."  
It really wasn't.  
 _Almost. It was almost over.  
_ I drew one last big breath. "I don't remember my pappa's name."  
I thought back hard once more, tried to fit any of the common Norwegian names to him again – Jan, Bjorn, Arne, Ole – to see if any of them stuck. None did. "I don't even know if I ever knew it, or if I just forgot it. I forgot most of his face and his voice, and I think he never said a word – to me, at least – that wasn't a some sort of worldly wisdom or survival instruction."  
A precious, short moment, there was silence, even in my head. No echoes of Aletta's angry ranting, no pictures of dad's dead blue eyes looking at me accusingly when I shoveled broth into his gaping mouth, no old smells of burning hair wafting by my nose. Nothing except the steady blips of Sarai's machine.  
There. I was done.  
That moment I learned that there was no fucking magic in getting a story off one's chest. My shoulders didn't feel any lighter. I didn't feel even a little bit cleaner. Fucking Hollywood, fucking books with their redemption stories. Lies and horsecrap.  
Sarai squeezed my hand hard and I got up from my chair to look her in the eye.  
She looked at me just like she had before. No questions. No accusations or disgust. No sadness or fear. No forgiveness. No bullshit. Like I hadn't just stripped down and given her the ugliest of shows.  
She just looked back like 'That's it? That's all? Okay.'  
Holy crap, this woman.  
"You still here, then?" I asked and she lifted one eyebrow and puffed some air through her nose as if to say _I said I would be, did I not?_  
"How're the painkillers holdin' up?"  
She pinched the loose skin between my thumb and forefinger with her fingernails and I winced. "Alright, alright, message received."  
She let me go. I looked at her, considering the plastic braces around her wrists and waist.  
People tied to beds for no fun reasons seemed to be _the_ recurring fucking motif in my life. My father, myself, Flame in his story, all those young bitches in the Nazi brothels, Phebe, Sapphira, and Sarai, first in that time capsule of horrors at the Hudspeth base and now again in Clearwood.  
"Kills me," I said because it was true. "Seeing you like this. Kills me."  
I reached out to unclip the brace around her right wrist – something I should have done much earlier – but she twisted her hand and grasped my fingers with hers again like she'd always done it like that.  
 _I'm getting used to this,_ I thought, and said,"Man, I still need that smoke."  
Suddenly, the door opened and one of the nurses came in. She eyeballed me and the joined hands on the blanket.I eyeballed her right back. "Got something to say, Hot Lips?"  
I could see in her face that she'd never seen a single episode of M*A*S*H. Unlike Sarai, she didn't have an excuse. Fucking philistine.  
"Sir, visiting hours will be over in ten minutes." _And you're not supposed to be here in the first place._ She didn't add the last bit, but I heard her think it. This section of the hospital was more like an ICU and off limits – to all relatives who were fucking pushovers and also not banging the head nurse, that is.  
"You don't say," I commented and ignored the implication.  
The nurse huffed and left, no doubt to go get reinforcements.  
Sarai's fingers twitched a bit.  
"Hey now, don't panic. I'm here and I ain't going anywhere. Except the shitter, at some point down the line. Not a fan of bed pans. But for you I'll make a knot into my cock to put it off." I winked. "God knows it's plenty long enough for that."  
There it was – the nameless horror, that wordless 'What's wrong with your brain that you fucking say shit like that?' I lived for that. I grinned.  
The door opened again and in came the nurse from a couple minutes ago, accompanied by Mels.  
"Mr Sorensen, I'm really sorry, but you really have to leave."  
 _Say 'really' one more time._ I was ready to escalate all over the room when Sarai let go of my hand.  
t-i-r-e-d, she wrote with her fingernail and blinked slowly. Theatrically, I thought.  
"Are you trying to get rid of me, sugarbun?" I asked her, and she shook her head exactly once in the most profound NO I had ever seen. It made me smile despite myself. So somber and earnest all the fucking time.  
"I'll be back like the fucking Terminator tomorrow morning before seven," I promised her and made sure the nurses in attendance also knew.  
"She's hurting. Try to give her something that doesn't trigger a psychotic break this time, will ya?" I glared at Mels and didn't wait for her bitchy response.  
"Before seven," I repeated with one last look into Sarai's eyes, then got out of there and smoked half a pack right there in the parking lot, looking at one of the dark windows without exactly knowing whether it was Sarai's room at all.  
That night, I didn't fall asleep for hours, but when I did, I didn't dream of anything.

/

 _ **Sarai**_ _ **  
**_  
I woke up with a start and thought I was dying. My heart was racing rapidly enough to make me want to retch. I was hot and cold all over. The breath in my chest seemed to be made of warm liquid instead of air.  
Once I had calmed a little and got my bearings, I realized that I had been mistaken.  
I was not dying.  
In fact, it was the opposite.  
It had been so long, I hardly even remembered. And even last time, with Judah, it hadn't been this intense.  
I closed my eyes and consciously clenched my lower muscles. A breathy moan escaped me at the awful hollow, fluttering feeling underneath my navel. The feeling came with a thin edge of something beautiful.  
My mouth was dry. The nurses had pulled out the tubes yesterday after Viking had left, because I had practically begged her to. My throat was a little raw but I would not complain. I did not want to be intubated all over again, ever again.  
My hands and middle were still tied, with even bigger, sturdier braces this time. "For the safety of the staff. I'm sure you understand", one of the nurses had said. Her right hand was wrapped in a bandage and she eyed me with almost as much suspicion as she did Viking. I did not remember what I had done to her.  
I _did_ remember a piece of a dream from last night. It sent heat into my face and I wished I could fold my hands in prayer. Wantonness was not proper, not even in sleep. It was a selfish distraction from… from...  
Thankfully, the nurse and Dr McGowan came and pulled my thoughts from the throbbing of my body. I was interrogated and fed, both with food and medicine, and washed.  
By the time the washing was done, however, I felt like a volcano about to erupt. My skin seemed too tight. The little bit of soft food that had pinched at my insides as it went down seemed to have settled sideways in my stomach. The room twitched and spun about me and my own pulse was deafening. When someone touched my shoulder, my elbow went up before I could even think and connected with something soft.  
The ensuing commotion inundated me until I slipped into half-consciousness.  
The smell of tobacco smoke made my nose crinkle and roused me from that strange state.  
"Never a dull day with you, is there?"  
It was curious. His voice soothed me more than usual, but it also woke me up like an ice-cold shower. At the same time. Just like music had turned out to be two opposite things at the same time. Just like I was unbearably tired and ready to burst into a fit at the same time.  
"Doc said it's the drugs doing weird shit to your body chemistry." He yawned. "I'd say it's probably that, and the fact that you are just a fucking rebel. Not doing so well in captivity. Can't say I really blame you. _I_ 'd be bored to shit within an hour. The color scheme of this place alone is making me fucking agro. I'd have started elbowing people in the face on day two the latest." He chuckled about his own joke, which dissolved into a smoker's cough, and then another yawn.  
"How are you?" The sound of my voice made me wince. It was still rough and scratched my throat.  
Speaking like this seemed a poor substitute to writing into his palm.  
I chanced a look at him. He was no different from before, but I looked at him with different eyes. They saw more now. They spied Ulfr in his eyes, along with Viking.  
"Fucking tired, to be honest" he replied. "Vending machine's broken, so no coffee for me. Did I really say 'before seven'? AK's right, I'm a grade-A moron." He wiped his face with his hand and squinted at me with one eye. " _'How are you?_ ' Are we doing small talk now? We're gonna talk about the weather next? Is that where this relationship is headed?"  
I did not agree that this was 'small' talk at all.  
More to the point, where could a 'relationship' possibly 'head'?  
 _Straight into the gutter, Sarai._ My lower muscles fluttered again.  
"Rhetorical questions, sugarbun. Stop thinking so hard, it's too early."  
I did – it was better for my _body chemistry_ – but I did not want him to stop talking. "What is an 'AK'?"  
"Automat Kalashnikova. World's most famous machine gun. One of my brothers took AK for a name because he was a sniper. Now, he's just a wise-ass. Who can kill you from 500 yards away."  
"What is a sniper?"  
Viking lifted both eyebrows. "You being serious?"  
I pressed my lips together. I knew perfectly well what an AK and a sniper was, but I wanted him to keep talking because the rumble of his voice happened to resonate with the tingle down low.  
Vike snorted at my lack of response. "Doc did give me a fair warning you'd be off-kilter today," he mumbled, then cracked his neck. "Now, unless you have any more _super-pressing_ questions you already know the answers to…" He scooted his chair back a bit. "I'm gonna put Janis on and catch some additional Z's." He fiddled with his phone and then chucked it onto the bed next to me. "Wake me up if one of the nurses comes in, eh?" He sunk back on his chair. His chin came to rest on his chest and his eyes closed. Then he murmured, "Just a couple minutes," and seemed to be asleep within seconds. His face lost the hard set that was normally there.  
I felt conflicted. On the one hand, he should not cut short his night's rest just to visit me.  
On the other hand, his presence relieved me.  
On the _other_ other hand, his presence also did the opposite of that today.  
And then there was a calm, quiet pleasure in watching someone else sleep. I could not remember anyone ever sleeping in my presence. So far, sleeping had always been a personal act, done in private and in solitude. Judah had always left the bed, after.  
A woman with a voice that sounded quite a lot like mine at the moment began to sing about herself and a man called Bobby McGee whose hand was in hers and whose body she held next to her own.  
Eventually, Vike's upper body followed gravity and slowly collapsed sideways until it met my mattress. A few minutes later, his head sagged down, down, down until it touched down on the blanket that covered my shins.  
I set my eyes onto the ceiling and prayed for perseverance, and for the nurses to delay their visit today so that Viking might sleep his fill.

/

 _ **Viking**_

I woke up and wasn't real sure who I was or which century I was in. My back and neck were screaming bloody murder at me for falling asleep in the famous Spiral Staircase position, while my ass and legs were AWOL. My mouth was full of fuzzy death. Surprisingly, my head seemed okay. _You didn't get smashed, you just took a fucking nap,_ AK supplied helpfully.  
"Fuck me, I'm gettin' old," I ground out and looked around with bleary eyes.  
Hospital. Bed. Bed with person in it whose legs I had used as a pillow.  
Young bitch. Blue eyes. Ash blond hair. Currently tied to the bed. Cheeks too hollow, eyes too sunken, but getting there.  
"Sarai," I declared and nodded as if I had made a breakthrough discovery when pieces started falling into place. "Clearwood. Before seven. Right." I rubbed the grit out of my eyes.  
"Did you rest well?" she asked. _Inquired_ , more like.  
I grunted in response and staggered to my feet. Pins and needles from my ass to my toes. Several spinal disks noisily slid back into place.  
"Sorry for, uh—sleeping on you there," I gestured vaguely to where I had put my head down at some point. She was under a blanket, but it still couldn't have been too comfortable. "How long was I out for?"  
She pointed to the phone lying face-up next to her but out of her reach, a digital clock on its screen. "Almost two hours."  
"Two hours?!" I repeated and grabbed the phone to confirm. "And no one's been by in the meantime?" I clearly remembered telling her to wake me if a nurse came in.  
"No," Sarai confirmed. "Nurse Simmons stood outside twice, though."  
Course she had, nosy bitch. I looked to the door. This one was made of metal instead of wood and had a window that allowed staff to look in, and a flap at the bottom, presumably to shove food trays into the room. Right now, this door was unlocked, but it could easily be different. The one window to the outside was made of security glass and nothing in here would so much as crack it. The chair I had sat on was a light plastic number that would break quicker than the window pane. All the heavier, sturdier stuff was screwed down.  
This place suddenly felt a lot like a trap.  
"I need a pit stop. You'll be alright for a couple minutes, yeah?"  
She nodded dutifully and pulled in a fortifying sort of breath. Whiny, she was not. But also not real honest when it came to these sorts of questions.  
Made me wonder what she really thought of me now, after yesterday.  
 _Do you really want to know?_ AK asked me.  
I had no answer.  
I hurried to the vending machine and pulled out one of those shrink-wrapped personal hygiene kits – "Yeah, flimsy plastic combs for everyone, but no coffee. You fucking piece of junk." I gave the machine a kick that earned me a fierce scowl from a small, gray-haired cleaning lady – and went to brush my teeth and wash my face.  
The dude in the mirror looked at me as if he knew that I shouldn't be here.  
As if on cue, my phone buzzed with an incoming message. Tanner.  
 _GPS says you're in El Paso again.  
_ That's all he wrote.  
I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, let that just hang in the air like that, you fucking white pride drama queen mother hen asshole," I groused, although the implication was clear enough with the seven words.  
 _Sweet Lita came across to visit. Ain't ready to let me go yet,_ I texted back and immediately switched into airplane mode. Fuck that guy.  
"Anything happen while I was gone?" I asked Sarai as I came back into the room. Anyone else, I would've expected a snort and a 'yeah, Bill Murray popped in with a bunch of male strippers. They performed a jazz version of Free Bird and then asked for directions to the next IHOP', seeing that I was gone for less than ten minutes.  
From her, I expected a straight 'No.'  
Instead, she hesitated. Very briefly, but she did, before she answered, "No."  
Weird. "You sure?" I probed.  
She pressed her lips together and nodded and avoided my eyes.  
Either she had become a bad liar in the past seven years, or I knew her too well now.  
"Right," I drawled. Figuring that it was probably something she thought was embarrassing, I asked, "You need a pit stop, too? Take a leak? Number two?"  
"No," she replied.  
"You itchin' somewhere?"  
She froze.  
"Like, on the nose or somethin'?" I suggested. Being shackled as she was, she couldn't scratch anywhere except on her thighs. I could only imagine how fucking awful that was. Even astronauts got a patch of Velcro on the inside of their helmets to scratch their noses while they floated around in their space suits – or so RJ once told me during his space phase.  
"No," she said, and this time I believed her. Her nose wasn't the problem.  
"You got an itchy ass, then?" I smirked when the Horrified Stare™ showed up on. I shrugged and elaborated, still smirking. "Asses are naturally itchy. For us menfolk, at least. Can't imagine bitches are much different in that department. In fact, it would be worse for you, what with having more real estate there, if you know what I'm sayin'." I gestured a generous curve into the air. "And, I mean, this is a grade-A establishment. Clearwood bedsheets are probably high thread count Egyptian cotton, all fancy and shit. Can't scratch anything on that."  
"M-My… it is not-" She blushed prettily.  
"But if it _were_ , you would totally tell me, wouldn't'cha? I can lend a hand like nobody's business." I leaned toward her, all conspiratorially, and caught a whiff of body odor. Ah. "You want me to get someone so you can have a quick bath?" There was a darker ring around the wide collar of her paper dress from where sweat had soaked into it, and her pits also had a bit of a shadow.  
"I was already washed today," Sarai explained. "Before you came here."  
"If you're feelin' uncomfortable, you can always have another wash, sugarbun," I insisted. I got up to walk out and find some nurse.  
"Viking, please- Don't go." The last two words were almost unaudible. "It... it hurts," she hushed.  
I was back and practically all over her in a second. "You hurtin'? Where?" I eyed the oversized leather cuffs around her slim arms. After the elbow attack, they had upgraded the security measures from plastic to leather. "I can get the nurse to change the-"  
"No. No, not... It... I feel so... It feels like I am burning up from inside. I-"  
I frowned at her. There was a flush high on her still-too-hollow cheeks and a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead, her upper lip, and her throat. Her hair was curling a little at the ends.  
"You're running a fucking fever." Overheating was a thing, right? Quickly and without thinking about it I grabbed her blanket and pulled it off her. I looked around and through the window in the door, thinking that maybe someone from the staff might be walking by. "I'll get someone-"  
"No!" She strained against her cuffs. "I don't need a bath. I don't need a nurse. I need... I need _you_." She lifted her middle up from the mattress so that the bones of her pelvis showed against her papery hospital dress. "Vike. Ulfr. Please. Help me. Give me- Please." She was panting now. " _Please. Ulfr._ "  
Finally, the fucking penny dropped, followed by my ass that dropped into my chair.

/

 **TBC**


	14. Chapter 13

_**Viking**_

Being a member of an outlaw MC, not to mention being built, tall and rugged if not exactly handsome, potent as fuck and hung like a horse, had naturally led to a whole army of bitches – and, yes, even some dudes (with, I presumed, big brass balls on them), and some people in between those two genders – begging for my attentions. Some had been coy and some had been straight-up scary direct. I had laughed at many of them, fucked many of them, had fun with and then left all of them sated and lying in their own wet spot before the night was over because that's how it fucking worked.  
None of them had been _this_ desperate, though.  
Or entirely _mine_. There was no other brother Sarai could turn to if I denied her. Tied up as she was, she couldn't even take care of it herself.  
She was helplessly at my mercy, and that ignited a fire in my gut.  
 _Holy fucking shit._  
I had my sister's DNA, after all.  
Her begging, those slow pumping motions she was doing with her hips and thighs there, and the way she said my name like a fucking prayer – all of that made my cock very, very hard very, very quickly.  
This was so much more wrong than the stuff I was usually into, on uncountable levels.  
AK's voice of reason floated through my head. _She's tied to a fucking bed and under the influence, and not even of her own volition. Don't you fucking take advantage of that. You're not a fucking rapist._  
I combed his fingers through my beard, stalling, struggling against myself. "Them's the drugs talking, sugarbun." My voice came out raspy. "They're messing with your hormones or something." _Damn it all to hell._  
Sarai's eyes widened in panic when she began to comprehend that I was about to walk out on her. "But it _hurts_. So much. It's so... swollen and hot."  
Of _course_ , she had to use those words.  
 _And dripping wet and twitching, I bet_ \- I bit back a groan and watched as she rubbed her thighs together. This was nothing like the club sluts pushing their naked, oiled-up tits in my face. This wasn't even like that one slut who got off on being tied up like a pretzel and blindfolded while someone fucked her in every hole.  
This was so much hotter.  
And she wasn't even naked. She wasn't even really trying.  
"Oh God, oh God," she breathed. "Please. Ulfr. I just... I just need a... _hah_... a little..."  
I tried.  
I _reall_ y tried.  
But damn it, I wasn't that fucking strong. That little gasp, it fucking broke me.  
"A little _what_?" I asked thickly.  
No amount of reasoning, neither AK's nor my own, could stop me from wanting to know precisely what it was she needed. From _me_. _Only_ me.  
I leaned over her on her bed, making sure to shield her with my body as much as possible, just in case some staffer with prying eyes walked by and peeked into her room. This view, this sight of her was for my eyes and my eyes only.  
"What do you need? Tell me." I titled my head so I could look her straight in the face. "Tell me _exactly._ "  
Her eyes were bright with fever, and what I now knew was lust. She licked her lips. _Fuck, that little pink tongue._  
"Tou- touch," she hushed. " _There_. Hah."  
" _Tell me_ ," I demanded. My hands clenched around the rails of her bed. "Exactly what _kind_ of touch. Tell me exactly _where_."  
Her mouth, lips glistening with saliva, moved, but no sound came out. Fuck, that was even hotter. She knew very well what she wanted, but her brain thought it was too obscene to voice it out loud. The polar opposite to every slut I'd ever had. All of them had been all too eager to tell me in great detail where I should stick what and how deep.  
Well, I fucking wanted to hear it. From her. Right now.  
"Use your words, sugarbun, or I walk away." _And into the next bathroom to wank out the boiling load pulsing in my balls._ Fuck, I could _smell_ her. Sweat like ripe peaches and the sweet, hot musk of drippy pussy. Her stink was obscenely intense and earthy in a world full of deodorized, soaped and sanitized people, and the pheromones in it hit my frontal lobe like a hammer.  
"No!" she gasped. "Don't leave!" She clenched her thighs as if she could someone trap me that way, then let them fall open. "I- I n-need your... your fingers. _God,_ " she added as a strangled whisper and squeezed her eyes shut, as if she couldn't believe she had actually said that.  
"And what do my fingers do?" I asked. The need to know was a physical thing now, pulsing at the tip of my spine. "What do you need them to do to you?"  
"To touch me," Sarai whined softly.  
"Touch you where?"  
" _There_ ," she insisted.  
I brushed the pad of my thumb over the bare skin on her left arm just below the padded leather restraint. She jerked her arm away as well as she could, startled and hypersensitive. "Your arm?" I asked, then reached down without breaking eye contact to graze my fingertips down the strip of naked skin on her calf, just above the white socks with the Clearwood logo. "Your leg?"  
"Yes! No!" She bucked on her mattress, lifting her upper body up as high as it would go until their faces were only a couple of hands' width apart. "Don't—Please! More!" she babbled.  
I had seen many horny women in my life, but never quite like _this_. She was in heat. I fucking loved it.  
"Tell. Me." I growled at her, frustrated like never before. I wanted to touch her properly, her arm and her leg and her everywhere, just as much as she wanted me to touch her, if not more. But I knew I couldn't, and wouldn't - _not today -_ and since that was the case, I wanted something else from her instead. I was prepared to fucking yell at her until she gave it to me.  
This was fucking ridiculous. I'd had so much sex in my life, but never like this. And I was fucking sweating through my shirt from the intensity of it. It was surreal.  
She fell back, her weak core muscles exhausted from fighting against the leather brace around her middle. "Your fingers… They… You pet my hair." She bit her lower lip and squeezed her eyes shut again, even more color rising in her cheeks. "My hair _there_."  
I groaned softly. I had never paid much attention to women's pubes – they were either there or they weren't, it was all the same to me so long as it was pussy – but imagining hers was torture. I could imagine her mound, that enticing bulge atop her pubic bone that would fit into my palm like a baseball when I cupped her cunt and sank the first knuckle of my middle finger into her hole. I knew the hair that covered it would be dark blond and curly, and darker, all sticky and wet toward the bottom center, where her cleft began. It would scratch and tickle against my fingertips, and against my lips, and my nose, and it would smell like all of her. Her essence would be in there.  
Heaven.  
As if she could feel my fingers on her already, she rolled her hips ever so slightly. Her breathing sped up.  
"You pet my hair and then… deeper…" The last word was barely a breath. "Please, deeper. Down."  
I leaned down over her prone body just a little more, not wanting to miss a single syllable. "Are my fingers touching your cunt, Sarai?" I pictured it some more and stifled another groan.  
Her lips parted for a shuddering sigh. She nodded.  
"Say it." I watched her mouth closely.  
"Your- Your fingers are tou- touching my-" She gasped. "My cunt."  
So flushed. Beautiful.  
"Look at me," I demanded, and she complied like a dream. "Now say it again."  
"Your fi-fingers are touching my cu—my cunt," she repeated and trembled under my stare, and under the feeling those words conjured up between her legs.  
"And how does your cunt feel against my fingers?" Fuck, I wanted to know so bad.  
"Oh, God. It feels… feels warm. Hot."  
"More," I demanded. "More, Sarai. Tell me everything."  
"Slick. Wet." She bit her lip and I watched, stupid envious of her teeth. I knew she was remembering some occasion at which she had touched herself, recalling it. That made it even better, and worse.  
"Is your cream dripping down your slit right now?" I asked, wanting to stick my fucking face between her legs and lick it up. "Because I'm touching you there?"  
She mewled, and nodded jerkily.  
"How do my fingers feel on your cunt? Tell me." I tightened my grip around the grab bars of her hospital bed as I fought the temptation that was Sarai on the brink of ecstasy. Fuck, she was beautiful.  
"Your… Your fingers are so big. Firm."  
Fucking right they would be. She was a slim thing. Her pussy would be a small, tender little sugar pie that would easily fit into my hand. Or my mouth.  
"Not—not gentle," she added in a whisper.  
She was _killing_ me. "I'm not being gentle with your cunt?"  
"No. " She shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. "No, no. You are the devil. So cruel."  
Oh _God_ , oh _fuck_. Yes, I fucking would be. I wanted to torment her until she screamed.  
"Because your cunt is too greedy, sugar. Do you have a greedy cunt?"  
She pressed her lips together and nodded eagerly. The tears brimmed over and streaked down her temples, her whole body was writhing in its ties.  
"It wants my big, rough fingers, doesn't it? It wants me to be cruel with it. To touch your clit even if it's too much. To stroke it roughly. Give it a slap."  
She flinched at the word 'slap'. Fuck me, she had _felt_ that. That was so hot.  
A tremor ran through her, from her toes to the crown of her head. She snapped her hips up again and again. I watched, mesmerized by her rhythm and the way that her whole body fucked the air.  
"Inside," she begged hoarsely. "Need your fingers _inside_. It's hollow, so… aching. Empty. Empty all night, all day."  
"Fuck," I choked out. Now _I_ could almost feel it. Her hot, weeping hole, her slippery flesh pressing around my digits, grasping and sucking me in deeper. I would bet that she was still so tight and clutch at me like a vise.  
"Yes," she sobbed. "Yes, _fuck_. Fuck. _Please_."  
"You want my fingers to fuck your cunt," I said. No more questions.  
"Yes, yes!" She nodded vigorously. Her face shone with sweat.  
"You want your cunt fucked hard. Say it."  
"Fuck my cunt hard," she complied with a shaky voice, "Oh, _God._ Fuck my cunt hard. Please."  
"No one else ever touch you like that, sugarbun. No one else touch you that good."  
"No one! Vike! _God!_ " she cried, humping the air like a maniac. The sound of my name, the red, flushed splotches creeping all over her skin and the smell of her sweat had my cock weeping pre-cum into my pants like I was some pimply fucking teenage virgin.  
But this one wasn't about me.  
She was ready. I wanted her.  
"What am I doing to you, Sarai?"  
"You are fucking me wi—with your fingers," she sobbed. "Your fingers are inside of me. Deep." She moaned wordlessly. "I can- feel you everywhere."  
"Faster." I was panting now myself. "Faster and harder, Sarai."  
She cried out and her hips pistoned up and down like crazy. Her eyes rolled up.  
"Look at me," I ordered. Again her attention snapped to me. Her pupils were dilated so wide I thought I might fall into them. "Cum all over my fingers. Cum, now."  
She pumped twice more and inhaled deeply, and then, for a long moment, she went completely rigid – her breath froze up and the world seemed to stop spinning right along with it – before the knot of tension burst open. She threw her head back and craned her neck until the muscles and veins in it stood out, and keened against clenched teeth, grasping at the air with her fingers while her thighs pressed together tightly.  
 _Not enough._  
"Look at me," I rasped. "And open your fucking legs. I want to slap your cunt some more while it's still twitching."  
She opened her legs, and, finally, her mouth and handed over the keening, stuttering cry I had been waiting for, all while keeping eye contact. I smirked and drank it down. Fuck if I couldn't feel that sound in my cock.  
She bowed off the bed as much as the brace allowed and gave a shuddering groan, then fell back, limp and robbed of every ounce of strength, pumping her lungs hard, her face all slack and blotchy and wet with sweat and tears.  
I also felt like I had done some exercise. My forehead was slick with sweat. My heart was knocking around in my fucking chest like a ball in a pinball machine.  
I took her in for another long moment –a shivering little ragdoll – then straightened myself and backed off her slowly. Letting go of the rails actually hurt my hands. My cock felt about as solid as those metal rails, too.  
 _She's still drugged, you dick_ , my inner voice reminded me.  
 _Yeah, well. Drugs wear off eventually_ , I replied sourly, and groaned a quiet "fuck" when I noticed the dark spot on Sarai's white gown, right where the papery material sagged between the tops of her thighs.  
"You're a fucking squirter," I murmured to myself more than to her. A squirter with a mind so repressed and so filthy, a pussy that smelled so sweet, a mouth that, when it said the word 'cunt', reminded me of slapping and sinking into one. "Could you be any more perfect?"  
Fuck. _Fucking_ fuck.  
I needed to get out of here. Now. I put the chair back into the corner at a very deliberate pace and made my way to the door. She spoke up when I grabbed the handle.  
"I—Thank you," she said, still a little bit breathless, then lowered her lashes as if suddenly shy. "For _that_." And the filter was back in place.  
I heaved a sigh and shook my head slowly. This woman killed me. "Fuck, no, sugarbun. That won't work at all."  
Her eyes went wide. "Did I… Did I do something wrong?"Her voice was so full of thinly-veiled despair that I suddenly regretted ever saying anything other than 'You're welcome'. Fuck, for all of her prickliness, this woman needed to develop a thicker skin, asap.  
"No. No, you didn't. You're fucking perfect. But when someone makes you cum like that, you don't _thank_ them. Unless you paid them for it."  
She seemed seriously confused for a moment, then apparently gave up trying to understand the particulars and refocused on the main problem. "Well. What… uhm. What would be the appropriate response, then?"  
I had no idea how a woman could be so jaded and deliciously filthy-minded and then ask a question like that, with nothing but innocence and earnestness shining in her eyes.  
Too earnest, I decided. I knew what she had gone through, and that shit like that dulled your sparkle, but she was way too young to be so grave for the rest of her life. She was almost as bad as Smiler with his perpetual Ivan Drago impression. Had the corners of her mouth ever ventured above equator? Not just during her time in El Paso, but in her whole damn life? Did they even know how? Time to find out.  
"A fucking smile would be a start," I answered.  
Sarai was clearly taken aback for a moment, then gave me the sweetest fucking little smile I had ever seen. It was shy and embarrassed, and surprised and relieved, sated and a bit cheeky, all at once. And was that quiet little sound a _giggle_? It made my still-dripping cock throb and twitch against my fucking zipper.  
 _Oh,_ hell _no._  
I heaved a sigh and turned back around. She didn't need to see the spectacle going on in my pants (any more than she already head because, really, there was no hiding a flagpole that big). I really needed to get out of here, find myself a private spot and get reacquainted with my right hand.  
As I pulled opened the door, actually grazing the large protruding steel rod in my jeans with it like a clumsy fuckhead, I couldn't help but add, "And maybe make a resolution to return the favor sometime." My cock, recently hurt, wept in thanks for that series of mental images.  
I glanced back at Sarai and saw her smiling still, even though she was trying to wrestle her face back into her usual blankness. Fuck me, it was a good look on her. And was it just my imagination or was she trying not to nod?  
"I'll get someone to, uh, clean you up and get your hormones back in line." Then I left her before I could claim my favor right there and then, with her still tied to her bed and completely helpless to stop me, her cunny still sopping wet and twitching from the mere _idea_ of my fingers in it- _Fuck. Me._  
I ran for the next toilet like my balls were on fire. That's what it felt like, too.

/

"Hahhh… that… that was really great." She slid her fingers down between her legs and clenched her thighs together, then moaned at the sensitivity. " _Really_ great."  
There were red rings around her wrists and ankles. I had tied her hands to the bed frame with a pair of fluffy handcuffs that she had readily produced from her nightstand when I had suggested it, and then fixed her legs with two of her husband's ugly as fuck checkered ties. She had pulled on all of them like crazy – hence the marks – and moaned and shrieked like a banshee the whole time.  
I wasn't into this, after all.  
I so much wasn't into this that I had thought about leaving her there halfway through, naked and tied up for her idiot spouse to find.  
 _Why the fuck wasn't I into this?_ Just a couple of hours before, the exact same scenario had me soaking my boxer briefs with pre-cum. But even so, the sight of a spread-eagled and helpless woman should not leave me cold. The smell of her pussy on my beard should not make me want to gag.  
"I'm done," I heard myself say as I pulled on my pants.  
She acted like she hadn't heard. Or maybe she really hadn't. "My shift tomorrow starts at seven, so I'll be there until-"  
"I'm done, Mels." No use beating around the bush. I was sick and tired of this situation with her, had been for weeks already. Had to be man enough to say it out loud at least. "We ain't gonna fuck anymore. This was it. I'm done."  
Her mouth hung open. She blinked. "Wow. _Wow_ , Vike. Did you just dump me after having the greatest sex ever?"  
Loaded question. I wasn't in the mood to explain to her that we'd never been a thing so that dumping was impossible or that the sex really wasn't that great – in fact, I had had better sex not four hours ago, standing up, completely dressed, without laying a hand on the bitch. So I just repeated, "I'm done," and put my shirt back on.  
She gave a bark of disbelieving laughter. "This is about Sarai, isn't it? You into rape cooch and brain damage now? Fuck me. Shoulda seen _that_ coming."  
I shot her a look that would've made grown men cry. She flinched away, broke eye contact and lifted both hands. "Alright. Alright. Whatever. Piss off, then." She scrambled off the bed and threw on her own clothes. "Come back once the bible psycho gives you your balls back. Until then, get the fuck out of my house."  
Gladly. I collected my phone and keys and left.  
The thirty minute ride to the shabby motel room I had been staying in yielded several conclusions:  
This _was_ about Sarai.  
The little bible psycho _had_ my balls even though I doubted she had any idea.  
I was in deep shit.  
It didn't feel as bad as I thought it would. In fact, I kinda liked it.  
Which meant that the shit was even deeper than that.  
I needed a beer. And a brawl.  
Make that two.  
Of each.

/

 _ **Sarai**_

I could not sleep. The nurses had given me a new sort of drug, one that made me languid, "to get a hold on those raging hormones" that had led to my "accident" which, they assured me, was still "absolutely natural and normal". In that languidness, I had spent the rest of the day listening to Doctor McGowan and Mr Phillips, a specialist for trauma and the psychology of abuse, as they used the word 'volatile' again and again until it lost all meaning, and then I had been taken to something called "water therapy" by Shirley that involved lukewarm water being trickled upon my forehead in a room that smelled like sandalwood.  
I should have been tired, but I could not sleep.  
He had not returned after—after _that_. Or maybe he had, but I had not been in my room. He usually sat with me until visiting hours were over, and longer. But not today.  
My mind seemed irreconcilably undecided on whether I should relive _that_ – numerous times and in great detail – or repress this vile, ungodly experience I had had at the hands of a Devil.  
Well, not at his hands, exactly. At his _words_ , more like. He had not laid a finger on me.  
 _Yet._ I flinched at how loudly this thought burst through my head.  
More than anything, however, the memory gave me comfort. Not only the immediate comfort of stilling the flutter of my muscles and slowing the overwhelming staccato pulse of my blood that had driven me to panic.  
I figured, if I could remember and cherish touches that had never really happened, then, eventually, I would be able to un-remember touches that had.  
I liked to remember the fire in his eyes when he looked at me just before he left.  
Nobody had ever looked at me that way. Judah had often had passion in his gaze, but now I understood that it was never entirely passion _for me_.  
Viking's passion was for me. It was clear in his face, and in his… well. In the reaction of his body.  
Such a big, big body. It made me feel even smaller than I was, but not in a bad way. Not anymore. A good sort of vulnerable. I had not even known there _was_ such a sort of vulnerability.  
I closed my eyes and allowed my mind to wander, just for a very short moment.  
 _What am I doing to you?_  
Before the moment was over, the door to my room swung open and two nurses, accompanied by a man in a blue overall, came in. They kept chatting with one another as they worked on the machines behind me. Before long, another man came in, pushing a gurney into the room which was now very crowded.  
"What is going on?" I asked one of the nurses – she looked like Nurse Lee but it was not her.  
"Relax," she said and gave me a kind smile.  
The other nurse stung my upper arm with an injection. I jumped, but it was over very quickly, and before I could even ask, both nurses worked on the brace that held my waist to the bed. They unbuckled it, then the two smaller ones around my hands.  
"We should go through the side entrance," one of the men said to the other three people in the room. "Stan just texted me. He parked on the lawn."  
The other man laughed. "What an idiot." I did not understand the joke.  
I wanted to lift my hand once it was free, just to touch my face – and scratch my nose – but each finger seemed to weigh a ton.  
So did my head. My left ear and my right. My tongue. My eyes and each eyelid.  
"Just relax," the nurse said again as she rolled off my socks.

/

 **TBC**


	15. Chapter 14

_**Viking**_

When I came in through the door, there were three nurses at the front counter instead of the usual one, in addition to two dudes in overalls. They all eyeballed me but I paid them no attention. I had shit to do and places to be.  
The first place I went was abandoned, though. The bed was there but Sarai wasn't in it. It was stripped of sheets and linens. The equipment was gone, too. I turned on my heel and hoofed it back to the front counter, fuming. Sarai and I had been here for almost two months now. These bitches knew exactly where I was headed and who I was here to see, and no one had the fucking decency to let me know that she'd been shifted from one room to some other room – again? Fuck these people.  
I swung by Sarai's original room, the one she'd been in before medication had started to fuck her up more, but that was now occupied by a dude who looked three quarters dead.  
"Where is she?" I asked once I had made it back to the front. Dudes in the overalls were still there, and Guy, and the Asian chick. I addressed her. "Where is my wife? You shifted her again, why? Has something happened again?"  
"Sir, please," she said, and I realized that she was some other Asian chick, not the usual one. They looked alike, even had the same name. Sisters, maybe. "You can give me a name-"  
"Sorensen, Sarai." I spelled both names out. "She was in 1-5B yesterday morning and the day before that, and in 1-14A before that. _Where the fuck is she now?_ "  
"Sir, there is no need for this type of language," Asian chick #2 told me off.  
Wordlessly, I disagreed. Strongly. She cowered. Smart bitch.  
"Hey!" one of the overall dudes shouted at me. "You don't get to talk to her like that! Calm down!"  
I whirled around and grabbed the dude by the collar, pulling him up and toward my face. "You know, I have mastered a secret martial art. When I use it on people, they keep their fat mouths shut permanently. It involves my fist, a paper clip and a pair of shoelaces. Want a demonstration?" I asked him and let him go before he could answer. He staggered backwards and fell on his ass. The other dude, an exceedingly intelligent human being, stepped back from me and lifted both hands when I swung my attention over to him.  
I caught sight of Doctor McGowan across his shoulder just as she disappeared through a door.  
"Doc!" I called and jogged after her, following her into some staff room. "Doc, where's Sarai?"  
She turned around, tea sloshing over the rim of the cup she was carrying. "Mr Sorensen. You are too early for the closing meeting. I believe it was scheduled for 11 today."  
 _Closing meeting_. What the fuck did that mean? My guts seemed to drop an inch. " _Where_ is Sarai?"  
The doc set the cup down on a table behind her, frowning. "Assistant Director Simmons and you have talked about this at length yesterday, no? This is what she told me, in any case."  
Yeah, Mels and I had spent half an hour together yesterday – it had felt a lot longer than that, so that had to be what she meant by 'at length' – but there had been very little talking. Especially none about Sarai's whereabouts.  
"Well, she lied to you," I snapped. "Where. Is. Sarai? Which room? Did she switch units again or what?"  
Doctor McGowan blinked at me. "Firstly, I do not care for your tone, Mr Sorensen," she reprimanded evenly. She had balls. "And secondly, I do believe you and Director Simmons have found a facility better-suited for your wife's specific needs. As I have repeatedly told you in our consultations, this would have been my recommendation, too. Again I would like to remind you that this is something you have discussed yesterday."  
I was out the door and back at the front station before she even finished the second sentence.  
"Mels. Simmons. Nurse Simmons. Where is she?" I barked at the second Lee. I didn't give a fuck that she was on the phone and looked at me like I was coming at her with a knife, or that the two overall dudes and Guy were huddled together and mean-mugging me.  
"Sir, excuse me-"  
Fuck this. I reached over the counter ripped the cable from the wireless telephone's docking station.  
"Assistant Director Simmons," I repeated to the panicked-and-pissed-looking Asian. "This is her shift. She's got one of those pagers on her, and a phone in her pocket. Either will do. Call her here or tell me where she is."  
"Ha- Have you tried her office?" the chick asked.  
I glared at her for another moment – _Nurse Simmons better be in her fucking office, bitch_ – before I was off.  
Seconds later, I deepened the hole in the wall with her door handle. Mels was sitting behind her desk and looked at me with her piercing green eyes like she had been waiting.  
"Where is she," I bit out between gritted teeth.  
"Sarai needs more specialized help at this point, both for her physical and her psychological wellbeing."  
" _Where!?_ " I yelled.  
"I'm doing her a favor. Getting her away from you is part of it."  
I was about to fucking flip the table like Jesus in the temple. Instead, I went and reached over and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her up and out of her chair.  
"You jealous fucking cunt," I snarled at her while she whined and grabbed at me, staggering around the desk. "She was doing fine. Getting better. Then you start pumping her full of this drug and that drug and suddenly she's going postal. If it smells like bullshit and looks like bullshit and tastes like bullshit, what do you think it could be?"  
I lead her around the room and pushed her against the wall, crowding her real close exactly the way she usually liked. Now, not so much.  
"I told you that her reaction to the medication was unforseeable-"  
"Where is she?!" I was roaring now. A small voice in the back of my head reminded me that I didn't fucking hit bitches. Not unless they asked for it.  
"In a high-security closed institution, where she fucking belonged from the start!" Mels roared back and managed to weasel away from me.  
 _Does this count as asking for it?_ My palm tingled and burned with the need to connect.  
"Your _precious_ not-wife is a certifiable psychopath. Not to mention a serial rapist and a murderer." She went to her shelf, pulled out a cardboard binder and threw it at me. It hit me in the chest and smacked onto the floor where it cracked open. Single sheets of paper skittered out.  
"You sold her as the poor, innocent victim. Everything about it was a lie. She was a lie, from start to finish. And you _used_ me. All I fucking wanted was for you to own up to what we had, but instead you throw me away for that _lie_ of a basket case _-_ "  
"What is this?" I asked her as I picked up the papers. They were copies of what looked like handwritten notes.  
"Letters of confession, far as I'm concerned. Copies, of course. The originals are with me, and on my computer." She crossed her arms over her chest. "You know, you're also featured in them. And the MC. I'm certain your Prez would be _thrilled_ to see these go to the authorities. I'm sure they haven't closed the New Zion case yet."  
I stared at her for a long moment, took her in as she stood there with her nose held high and her eyes full of challenge. So proud of herself for practically trafficking a sick girl. That's what it was. I knew for certain that Sarai wouldn't have wanted to leave. She wouldn't have wanted to go anywhere without me.  
Same as I.  
"Last chance, Mels," I said quietly and held her gaze. "Tell me where she is."  
"Read my lips," she answered. "Fuck. You. Vike."  
I did flip the desk, then. It was sturdier than I had anticipated, but I was so fucking angry, it could've been a solid oak number and it wouldn't have made a difference. The deafening crash of wood, glass paneling breaking, computer equipment and stationary smacking against a parquet floor was satisfying for a moment, but my mind was somewhere else.  
I left the office and heard shouting voices carrying down the corridor. No doubt Guy and back-up would show up in a hot second, and then the cops would arrive and it might get messy. Messy was fun, but I didn't have the fucking time.  
I turned and spied, with my little eye, a fire alarm button a couple of feet down the hall.  
Heh. _This one's for you, sugarbun._  
Seconds later I made my way outside through one of the fire doors and went around to the parking lot just as people began trickling out of the facility, accompanied by a yowling fire alarm. Stuffing the binder into the saddle bag, I got on my bike, pulled out my phone, sent a short prayer up to Odin, just in case his wrinkly ass was watching, and dialed.  
It rang twice. Three times. Four times. Five times. I held my fucking breath.  
He answered. "The fucking nerve-"  
"Tanner," I talked over him and pulled up two words. They had to be used very sparingly to maintain their power. Fuck knew I had barely used them at all in my life – what was the point of being an outlaw, otherwise? But right now, they were appropriate. And needed. I _needed_ to get to Sarai and with Mels so uncooperative and those bridges burnt to ashes, there was no other way. "Listen. I'm sorry."  
That shut him up for a second. Maybe two. He probably heard the sirens in the background. "Oh _fuck_. What did you do, Vike?"

/

I managed to cut the nine hour ride down to seven and a bit by speeding like a lunatic. My bike hungrily ate the asphalt for me as if it knew that I was in a hurry, easily weaving between cars and leaving two state troopers in the dust.  
I had a brick in my gut the entire time. What if Mels had been bluffing? Doc McGowan didn't seem very concerned about the whole situation – what if that was because Sarai was still at Clearwood after all? It shouldn't be that easy to transfer out a patient, one day to the text, anyway. Or if she wasn't – what if Mels had transferred her to another clinic in El Paso, and I was riding into the wrong direction the entire time? And those letters Mels had thrown at me – should I have gone after the originals? What if that whole thing came back and bit me – and the MC – in the ass?  
I had been fucking headless and now I was in deep shit, so much was clear.  
Just as I left the Highway 183, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I almost fishtailed in my hurry to pull over onto the shoulder of the road and answer it. "Did you find her?" I barked into the phone. Fuck, my hands were shaking and I was holding the thing upside down.  
"You're gonna need backup," Tanner said by the way of an affirmative.  
"Where is she?" It had been half a day. She could be in fucking China.  
"Atlanta, Georgia," he said – I heaved a deep breath because that wasn't China – and then added, "I think."  
I tried really, really hard not to lose it. "You _think_?!"  
"You fucked up so fucking hard with Mels that she went and deleted _all_ the fucking info, turned your bitch into a Jane Doe and shipped her off to nowhere. Imagine a UPS package that doesn't fucking exist anymore. Even the transportation company doesn't have that run on its ledger. All I could do was hack into mental institution servers, one by one, and comb for deliveries scheduled. I found exactly one that is about to accept a new patient in about two hours, in Atlanta, Georgia. But it could be a fucking coincidence. There is zero patient information for me to find, so it might not be her."  
I tried to wrap my head around this. There had to be a limited number of patients admitted to these types of hospitals on any given day, right? Then again, how many hospitals were there in the US?  
Tanner seemed to be able to hear my thoughts by how they rattled.  
"Even if we assume that she's still in the US – if Mels has given her to some no-name lo-tech/no-tech asylum that's run by catholic fuckin' nuns who don't know how to operate a TI calculator, or one of those Scientology bins who run their own secure servers outta fucking Liechtenstein, there won't be a digital trail for me to find. Or if Mels just admitted her to a run-of-the-mill hospital to blindside you, she'll be a needle in a fucking needlestack."  
I tore some of my hair out as I walked back and forth, thinking, digesting.  
"Mels hates my guts and doesn't exactly like Sarai, but she's still a fucking nurse. She wouldn't just hand a patient over to Scientologists." At least that's what I hoped. "And she thinks Sarai is dangerous, so she wouldn't but her in any old hospital where she could walk out again in a week. She said something about high security, too. And how the fuck would Mels get into contact with a lo-tech asylum?" Far as I could tell, she was the opposite of religious. "Tell me about that institution in Atlanta."  
"You're gonna need backup," Tanner repeated, apparently accepting that I latched on to the one solid lead with all my might. "North Atlanta Psychiatric Hospital. Somehow overlooked by deinstitutionalization in the 70s. Long-term in-patient care facility. Privately owned with a public front, around 60 registered patients on the books, 35 permanent staff, two security firms attached. No negative headlines to be found anywhere. Couple of positive yelp reviews, though."  
A clip from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest flashed through my brain. "I bet." I spat onto the asphalt.  
"If it's really her, she might be in good hands, Vike," Tanner said and I almost smashed my fucking phone onto the ground.  
" _Your_ spic bitch might be _in good hands_ in El Salvador, too, Tanner," I growled and hung up, yelled at no one in particular, got back on my bike and floored it to the compound.  
I was gonna need back-up.

/

Flame had not spoken a word to me for the first four hours of the twelve hour trip. I was fine with that. I was almost as pissed at myself as he was for having to drive to _yet another_ fucking hospital, without even knowing if this would be the last trip or just the first of many because – let's face it, if I didn't find her in Atlanta, I would just walk into every single US institution until I did. And if I ended up looking for her in China, I would fucking brush up on my Mandarin until I could say "Hello, I've come to get the pale, blonde psycho bitch. Show me where she is and maybe no one gets hurt" in the local dialect.  
The 'people I fucking owed one'-list was steadily growing. Tanner, Tanner _again_ , AK, Flame. Madds.  
"Go with him. He needs you," she had said, coming around the corner and into the hallway with Isaiah on her arm. She had looked at me with that Maddie-smile when I greeted her, surprised to see her.  
"Mae was a little fed up with me and… everything, I think," she explained, still smiling though. "And I'm not overly fond of hospitals, and felt increasingly homesick, so- Here I am." She leaned in and laid a kiss on Flame's naked shoulder. "Go with him, my love. I shall be here, catching up with our children, and waiting for you."  
And just like that, Flame was in. Madds didn't even know what this was about. She just knew I was desperate. A goddamned angel.  
With Phebe at work and "still mad at me, the stubborn bitch", AK agreed to gear up and come along, before I had even explained what was going on and where we were going.  
When I did explain, sitting in AK's cabin's kitchen with my phone between us on the table, ready to call Tanner for details, both of my brothers looked at me like I had lost my mind.  
"Sarai." AK said her name like it had a bad taste. "That's the evil cunt who hazed Phebe and Bella in New Zion, isn't it? Prophet Judah's consort? She didn't die in the ambush, then?"  
"She hurt my Maddie," Flame added. His hands formed tight fists.  
"There's no excuse for the shit she's done. But believe me, she's been paying for it, ten- and hundredfold," I assured them both, feeling bitter. "She might've been one of the girls at the ghost town. She might have been the one in the cabin next to Saff, next to Phebe. One of the brothers might've bought her pussy that day. Or one of the Nazis. She would've been 14."  
Flame hissed some air through his teeth. AK glared darkly at me. I glared back.  
"You saw her at that Nazi house. You _smelled_ her. And that was just the tip of the shitberg. What happened to Phebe and Sapphira is _nothing_ compared to her last seven _years_."  
AK had grimaced and heaved a big breath. "You want to bring her here. Prez and Ky ain't gonna be fans." _And neither am I._  
"Prez and Ky can each kiss one of my pale, hairy ass cheeks," I replied. _And so can you,_ I answered his stare with one of my own.  
"You're serious," Flame stated. I decided to interpret it as a question.  
"Fuck yeah, I am," I nodded and got up from the chair. "I want that bitch back, so I'm going to get her, with or without you. She belongs with me."  
Flame and AK had not said another word. We'd geared up, got a bike and the van, and we'd left around 4pm.  
I had no idea how to make this work, but I didn't really have the luxury to be thinking about that now, anyway. Not when Sarai was still lost to me. _Fuck._ I couldn't even be sure I was headed even roughly the right direction.  
Tool's 'Aenima' was blasting through the van, making the windows vibrate and saving me from having to try and make conversation with Flame. AK was half a mile ahead of us on his chopper, even more pissed at me than my tattooed brother. The briefing at his cabin had been just that – brief, to the point, the basics about Clearwood, the North Atlanta Psychiatric Hospital, Sarai and what had happened shortly before – but the sniper had connected the dots and probably correctly guessed all the shit that had happened in El Paso, which had led me back home and to the bottom of the bottle, and to come at Sapphira like a fucking bull in heat, and to being in fucking Tanner's debt _twice_. He knew I had let Sarai make a train wreck out of me, and that none of it woulda happened in the first place if I hadn't been a massive idiot and gotten involved.  
All of those stupid decisions would only ever be okay if I found Sarai again. That was a lot of money riding on a single, slightly sickly, slightly broken, pale, wild horse.  
I barely kept myself from bashing my own head against the console – yeah, it had probably been a good idea to ride shotgun in Flame's van instead of being a menace to everyfuckingone out on the asphalt on my own bike – and flipped the glove box open and closed, open and closed, open and closed. On the fourth flip, a brown binder slid forward and blocked the latch.  
I knew that no one at the MC would ever go through someone else's saddlebags and take shit out of them – not even the munchkins would ever do that, they'd been taught that bikes were holy – but I still couldn't bring myself to leave that fucking binder behind.  
I reasoned that, if Mels was right and the contents of these letters could really be weaponized and used against the MC somewhere down the line, I should know what exactly was in them. Know thy enemy and shit. I flipped the cover open.  
The copies were grainy, made with some photocopier on its last legs. Mels had scanned a notebook and copied a double page onto one sheet of paper so that the area around the middle crease was too light from overexposure. Sarai had used a light blue ballpoint pen, which made it worse. Still, her words were legible. I leafed through the loose papers. She had a quasi-calligraphic handwriting in some of them, all neat and pretty without any curlicues, and a hasty chicken scratch in others. A few of the pages had dates, so I shuffled them around until they were roughly in order.  
The one with the earliest date read: _I_ _do not know, what I should write. The doctor seems pleased that I am writing at all, however, therefore I shall continue. So long as I have nothing to write, I can only_ After that came only squiggles, followed by the ABC forwards and backwards in capital and lower case letters, followed by numbers from zero to 143 that cut off at the '14' of the next digit.  
The following three entries in this therapeutic diary were exactly the same, except that she only made it to 65 on day 2 – she had made considerably more squiggles that time – and all the way up to 209 on day 3.  
It almost made me laugh. Stubborn _and_ persistent.  
Day 4 read: _The rules for Double Solitaire are as follows: Each player plays with their own 52-card pack. The starting layout is comprised of 28 cards in 7 piles, each having the top card face up and the rest face down. The left hand pile...  
_ She managed to fill almost two whole pages with this. Some of these sentences were word-for-word quotations from me, like she had a photographic memory or something.  
 _There once was a family, a father, a mother, and a daughter. They lived together in a small town in which nightmarish beasts roamed the streets at night. The father packed his small suitcase and left with a ship. He sailed the ocean…_  
She narrated the entirety of Shaun Tan's 'The Arrival', which took her eight neatly scribbled pages, and closed with: _This is my second book._ I didn't know what she meant by that, until I found another four pages on the next book I had given her – Tan's 'The Red Tree' – along with the footnote _This is my third book._ "You've got to be fucking kidding me," I muttered under my breath and vowed to build that woman a goddamn library.  
Her handwriting on 'The Red Tree' seemed less neat. I wondered if she had been agitated, or drugged while writing. Or maybe the book had just done different things to her? She had never told me whether she'd liked it or not. Because I had never asked her. Because I had flipped the lid and gone home instead of talking to her about it. _  
After my head was healed, a man came and ordered the healers to conduct a gynecological examination, to see whether I was still a virgin. I told him I was not, yet he refused to believe me. He was present in the room because he wanted to make certain for himself. I remember his cold fingers and his fingernails which were too long.  
_ This must've been a memory from long ago. I couldn't bring myself to read the five pages that followed, not with that last fucking sentence. I skipped them and found references to the Hangmen instead.  
 _The Devil's compound was much richer and better defended than Judah had indicated. I was nervous because I was certain the men had machines with which they could read my mind. Especially their second, the vice-president, seemed to see right through me. God Himself made shields out of the three whores and placed them in front of me to protect me from the fallen angel's wrath. I took all of it as a sign that I was on the right path. After all, David had to overcome Goliath, Joseph was rebuked again and again – obstacles and opposition always marked the road of the righteous. That is what I was taught. But at the end of the path of the righteous is always glory and grace, and I reached neither. Therefore, I must be wicked.  
_ "Welcome to the club," I muttered to her as if she could hear me. I leafed through the pages and scanned for more instances of the D-word.  
 _The day the Devil's men came to New Zion, Judah loved me so fiercely I could feel it in my body with every step. He kept me close and would join with me every other hour. I could feel his doubts after his brother had deceived and forsaken him. He sent me from his side when the gunshots started to ring out. I wish I could remember his last words to me. I remember fetching a gun.  
_ I tried to remember whether I had seen her that day, but the memory was just chaos-as-usual. _  
This Devil's man is confounding.  
_ One single sentence. I couldn't help a laugh. "I count that as a solid 5 out of 10, sugarbun."  
Some more pages full of nonsensical squiggles and ABCs followed, and then a detailed description of how to play Uno.  
 _The new doctor is small and boyish. I cannot be afraid of him._  
Weird thing to write. _  
_Another page with squiggles.  
A… cooking recipe? All-American potato salad. "Holy moly, easy on the pepper, woman."  
Flame glanced at me. "Eyes on the road," I said and angled the pages away from him like a moron.  
The following pages were so densely scribbled on, it was hard to read in the moving car. Sarai had written on and between the lines to fit twice the number of words on the paper.  
 _Judah had risen to his rightful place in the commune. He was often occupied with dealings that concerned him and the Order. It was his duty and his right to awaken new women, particularly since more men were joining us. I remember that he awakened the last one on the day before the Devil's men came. On that account, he was in a hurry. He joined with her too vigorously. She bled and fainted. I slept with her cradled in my arms until the morning before calling for the sisters to take her body away. Even pale and cold, she was prettier than me and her hair smelled like lilacs.  
_ I really wanted to stop reading, but she went right on in the next paragraph, as if she was purging herself all at once. Her handwriting got worse very quickly, as if she had a cramp.  
 _Leah and Rahab were seven years old when they came to live with the commune. Their father was one of the Elders, their mother a whore from the outside. She had raised her daughters to be willful and ignorant of the Lord's Way. Both of them refused the Elders even when they were reprimanded, castigated and cleansed by the men, they were obstinate towards the sisters. They refused to submit to the Lord. More than that, they incited rebellion in the other women and created unrest in the house. So I took a crop and beat the taller Rahab. She refused to bow and instead turned her face to me. I caught her in the eye with the switch. She bled and the wound got infected which caused her to lose the eye. When Leah came at me one night for vengeance, I pushed her down a staircase. She broke both of her legs in the fall. Judah told the men not to reset the broken bones but to use her new state to facilitate the sharing._  
"Oh, for fuck's sake." That was a scenario no amount of alcohol was going to scrub from my brain.  
 _Rachel had beautiful bright red hair. She looked just like sister Phebe, Judah's previous consort. Judah told me how her awakening had made him hungry for joining more with her, how her awakening had brought him closer to God than any before. Rachel wanted to be his second consort next to me. I felt him turning away from me and towards her, so I instructed her. She should be able to take my place fully. But I found that she was not worthy. She was stingy with her body. She refused to understand that our bodies never belong to us.  
_ She continued in the same line. _  
Brother Luke, to whom I owed everything since he had introduced me to Prophet Judah, had used my body and all of its orifices that evening, and yet the other girls were crying after a mere touch from the other men. I could not bear their crying without good reason.  
_ And then, the last entry.  
 _My impulses are monstrous and my deeds sinful. I am worse than a monster.  
_ "Pull over," I told Flame. "I need a piss."  
Actually, I needed to scream at a couple of clouds just in case God was riding around on one of them, and shoot someone, but I didn't want to do it in the car.  
Flame nodded and started to slow down.  
Minutes later, I stalked out of the brush, towards AK and Flame who were waiting for me.  
"You good?" Flame asked, smoking a cigarette like he was trying to punish it.  
"I'm driving for the next couple hours," I replied. "Try to keep up with me," I shouted at AK over the noise of the traffic. "Let's get to fucking Atlanta." _And get my monster._  
Eight hours later, around 2am in the morning, I pulled up in front of what looked like a prison but was actually the North Atlanta Psychiatric Hospital.

/

As it turned out, marching into a psychiatric hospital and getting out a chick that was tied to a bed was harder than doing the same at a Texan Nazi base. This particular psychiatric hospital had a security guy at the entrance who had to be subdued, and a couple of high gates. The alarms went off as we walked in through the front door, but died off before AK and I came up to the first nurse's station. Flame turned around, no doubt to clean up behind us and cover our asses.  
"Tanner came through," AK muttered into the sudden deafening silence. I sucked on my teeth. At this rate, I'd soon be owing Tanner my firstborn and the bigger one of my balls.  
"Good morning, ladies," I spoke to the two confused-looking night nurses behind the desk. Their eyes were wide as saucers. Maybe because of my size. Maybe because of the size of my M24E6 which I was casually aiming at them, just to make sure we didn't start off on the wrong impression. Probably a combination of both.  
"Name's Vike, this is my good friend AK. We're here to pick up a package that has wrongly arrived here yesterday, around 6 or so, from beautiful, scenic El Paso, Texas. Don't."  
I lifted my gun just an inch to let the nurse know I had seen her fingers stray towards some sort of panic button. She lifted her hands up and scowled at me. Good fuck, I was fed up with nurses. I breathed in and out and tried real, real hard to stay calm for another couple of minutes.  
"'K and I really don't mean trouble. In fact, we're doing you a favor. The new patient you got is something of a fiend, ya know. Real high fucking maintenance. She'd wreck all y'all's shrinks within two months. Believe me, I read her diary. That girl is _fucked_ in the head. Now, which one of you can tell me exactly where she is?"  
"Sir, please-"  
I lifted my gun again. "Just 'cause we're here to take a basket case off your hands don't mean we're saints. In fact, I left my saintly patience on the side of the I-65. I'll ask one more time before I start with someone's kneecaps: New patient. Female, 'bout yae high, blond, great ass. Fifteen to twenty hours ago. From El Paso."  
That set the older nurse in motion. She tapped on her computer's keyboard with shaking fingers. AK walked behind the desk to look over her shoulder.  
"There, uh," the nurse looked at me, my gun, and at AK, and his gun, with fear. "There were two new patients yesterday. White female, 43 years old-"  
"The other one."  
The nurse flinched. "White female, age unknown, estimated 20 years old-"  
"That's her."  
Please. Please let it be her.  
"The- The patient was admitted to room 37, up on the third floor, East wing," the nurse supplied tightly, speaking more to the muzzle of my gun than to me.  
"See? That wasn't so hard," I said and turned to the other nurse, a young black chick with short, curly hair. "Your good colleague here has done her part. Now it's your turn to escort me and my friend to room 37, third floor, East wing."  
The nurse didn't move. She glared at me, hating me with the fire of a thousand suns.  
I rolled my eyes. I normally appreciated shows of disobedience and spines of steel and all that. But we were in a bit of a hurry right now, so I took out my knife – the large, gleamy one – and held it right under her nose. "Room 37. Third floor. East wing. Bring the keys."  
Suddenly, both women gasped, whimpered and lifted their hands. I looked around to see Flame walking into the station with his Uzi in his hand, looking his usual disturbing self.  
"Yeah, that's my other good friend, Flame," I introduced him. "He's gonna stay here and make sure no one does anything stupid with the computers or the security system. So, who's coming along?"  
The younger nurse who had refused to escort AK and me was suddenly in a big fucking hurry to show us the way. As we walked out, I leaned towards Flame and lowered my voice. "No killing today, yeah?" I pointedly looked at his gun, then at his twitching face to assess his mood. "You can scare the shit out of security if they come round the corner, but try not to kill them, eh? Really don't wanna be chased by the fuzz all the way to Texas."  
He scowled but nodded. I nodded back. He'd be alright for a bit. Still, better not wait around. I hurried the nurse along.  
We went down a corridor and up a staircase, exited on the third floor and onto an identical corridor. The whole place was deserted, probably because it was so early in the morning.  
"The patient was heavily sedated a few hours ago," the nurse informed us.  
I couldn't help a wry grin. Yeah, she'd given them a fight.  
"The effects of the sedatives will last for another few hours at least. In my medical opinion, the patient is in no shape to be transported-"  
"Just get us there, Nurse Ratched," I snapped.  
I felt AK eyeballing me but didn't turn around to confront him. He didn't know Sarai. She'd pull through.  
 _If it was her.  
_ It seemed to take fucking ages to get to room 37. By the time we got there and the nurse opened the heavy door, I was ready to scream. _Please let it be her_ ran through my head like a catchy 80s song.  
"Stay here," I growled at the woman and shoved her out of the way once the lock snicked open. AK would watch her for a sec.  
The room was tiny. It had a slit for a window and a cot surrounded by high tech equipment which I didn't give a shit about right now.  
I saw her and exhaled for the first time in roughly 36 hours. My knees got a bit wobbly, actually, and I had to hold on to the fucking wall for a second. This was by far not the longest I had ever gone without sleep, but it sure as shit had been the most trying.  
I was fucking exhausted and I needed to breathe. Just a moment.  
It coulda been someone else, Tanner had said. She could've vanished into the system. I wouldn't have had a chance in hell to find her again.  
So close. _So_ close to losing her.  
"Hello, sugarbun. How're you doing there? Did you miss me?"  
She didn't even twitch. Pumped to the gills with sedatives, no doubt. Didn't look peaceful even conked out on barbiturates.  
They had tied her down on hands and waist again, with a sci-fi-looking plastic contraption that opened underneath the cot where Sarai wouldn't be able to reach. I knelt down, pulled the ties open and off her and gathered her in my arms.  
"Listen, we have to stop meeting like this," I told her unresponsive face. Fuck me, she was a sight for sore eyes. "It's always me getting you out of someplace, and you too drugged up to remember my heroics and show your immense appreciation with a blowjob. Ain't working out for me."  
I combed my fingers through her hair and cupped the back of her head, ran my other palm down the chilly skin of her arm as far as the IV in the crook of her elbow allowed and to her fingers. Cold and slim, just like I remembered.  
Yeah, she was real.  
Minutes later, she was in the very same seat she had been in months before, wrapped in my cut and a blanket this time, the baggy with saline solution hooked onto the oh-shit-bar above her. I was in the passenger seat, one ear on the phone with Tanner guiding us around police on patrol, and one eye always on her. Déjà fucking vu, except this time, everything was different.  
We were going home.  
No one was waiting there with open arms, so much was clear. Sarai was one messed-up bitch with a messed-up past. The Prez, my brothers, their bitches – none of them were bound to jump with joy to see her and be reminded of all that vile shit that had happened. No part of the immediate future was going to be easy.  
But I didn't fucking care.  
We were going the fuck home and she was coming with me.

/

 **TBC**


	16. Chapter 15

_**PART 5**_

 _ **Sarai  
**_  
I did _not_ want to relax.  
I did not want to relax _at all._  
Who were these men?  
Where were they taking me?  
I needed to go back.  
I wanted to go back _now._  
 _I want to go back.  
I want to go_ back! _  
_"Calm down."  
 _No!_ _I want to go back!  
_ "Fuck no. We ain't going back to El Paso, ever."  
 _No no no n-_  
 _Viking.  
Viking!  
_"Viking!" _  
_Oh God, that was my voice.  
Oh God, _please-_  
"Sarai." _  
_That noise was the sound of my heart seizing. _  
_"Shh. Alright, alright. Open your eyes for me, Sarai."  
I tried but it was like lifting the sky. I could not. The effort sapped my feeble strength.  
"They gave you the good stuff again, eh? Never mind, then. Keep 'em closed."  
My right hand was folded into a larger, slightly warmer one, and squeezed.  
"Keep 'em closed. Sleep it off. You'll be fine, you hear me?"  
"Five miles," another voice said from farther away. My body was jostled. Suddenly, the noise of car tires on asphalt became overwhelming in my head. I wanted to throw up, it was so loud. Everything was so heavy.  
"Fuck. Make her stop!" someone shouted, and Viking shouted back, "Just fucking drive, man!" Their voices were like thunder clashing.  
His hand slipped out of mine and pressed down on my forehead. It was cool against my skin there.  
"You'll be fine."  
I believed him.  
Stupid.

/

I woke up only to be pulled back under almost immediately despite my efforts to stay awake. It happened three or four times before I managed to claw my way out of the drowsy darkness and into-  
Where was I?  
A dimly lit chamber made of dark wood. I was prone on a bed that was twice as wide as it needed to be, with a woolen blanket half-draped over me. There was a small night stand with a small lamp emitting a little bit of light next to a tall glass of water, a closet whose doors stood open and showed an empty interior, and a window with the drapes drawn mostly shut. Across from me, there was a door that was slightly ajar.  
From the darkness between the door and the frame, two yellow eyes were watching me.  
I sat up with a gasp, and the room spun in two directions at once, forcing me back down. For once, my arms and hands were free to touch my sweat-soaked face. It felt foreign, like the bones of my cheeks had been re-arranged and re-molded. My fingers seemed so spindly now.  
Still lying on my back, I slid my legs to the side with infinite slowness until my feet started dangling off the edge of the mattress, then inched forward until my pointed toes brushed the floor. I sat up again, infinitely slowly this time, and succeeded, even though all the blood in my head seemed to curdle like milk, and the light dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened around me.  
I looked to the door again, and the eyes blinked at me before they vanished. A cold shiver ran down my spine.  
I looked down on myself. My legs were so thin. My knees seemed too pointy. My feet were only bones, looking almost like bird claws with the knuckles poking up under the pale skin and their too-long toenails. I would not walk anywhere.  
Crawl, maybe.  
Where? No idea.  
I heard a dull voice through the open door that came closer but then moved away again. Heavy steps creaked on wooden floor. The house itself seemed to shift and move around noisily. I heard the wind outside.  
The voice and the steps were not familiar. Dull dread collected in the pit of my stomach. I reached out and grabbed the glass of water. So heavy, or maybe I was just weak. I would not be able to fling it at anyone. I sipped the water. It tasted slightly metallic. My tongue felt swollen and spongy.  
I waited for maybe an hour, unmoving because I had no means to go anywhere, and nowhere to go, and could not bear the thought of lying down again. The voice moved around, fell silent, spoke up again.  
Eventually, the steps came to rest before my door, and then the door squeaked open.  
A stranger stood outside. He wore black boots, black pants, and colorful ink covered him like a shirt from his belt to his chin, with some tendrils of it snaking up the side of his neck and to his scalp which was shaven on one side while black strands fell down over his shoulders on the other side. Silver studs and rings glinted in his eyebrows, the wing of his nose, his chin, cheeks and ears and clicked on his fingers.  
He was frightful to behold and his facial expression was one of pure hatred, but I felt too weak to even muster fear now. I had been afraid for so long, the feeling had frayed.  
"Hungry?" His voice was deep for his relatively slim frame. Even though there were plenty of muscles underneath the ink, he was maybe half of Viking's size. He was also a lot younger.  
I pondered his question, then shook my head. I felt like I would never be hungry again.  
"Tough shit," he replied with a shrug, turned and walked way. "I'm making a soup and you're gonna eat it."  
Indeed, he returned a few minutes later with a bowl and a spoon which he handed me after snatching the water from my hands. The bowl was hot to the touch and stung my palms but I did not dare set it down.  
After a few moments of watching me, the man gave an annoyed sigh. "It's not poisoned or anything. Unless Campbell's now want to kill their customers. So just fucking _eat_ , will ya?" He walked out and shouted through the house. "Won't have you starve on my watch. Don't you fucking die before Vike gets back. He can deal with your corpse."  
Vike.  
I remembered him telling me that I would be fine. Or had I imagined it? Everything was so fuzzy in my head. There had been two men – I could not even remember if one of them had been the man who had given me the soup. I only remembered their blue overalls. They had taken me out of my room. I had felt sick for a long time. There had been noise, and a hand in mine.  
"You'll be fine." I could hear him say it, but that did not mean much. My head was full of memories that were false and twisted, and there had already been so many promises that were long broken and void.  
I ate the soup. It barely tasted like anything on my tongue. My stomach cramped around each spoonful.  
The young man came back long after I had finished and snatched the empty bowl from my hands.  
"Where is Viking?" I asked, but my voice swallowed the first two words until only hot breath came out. The man still understood.  
"No fucking idea. No idea when or if he will come back, either. He packed his knives, a bunch of guns and all of his ammo, gave me the new WiFi-password in exchange for a promise that I'd look after you, and got outta Dodge." He was clearly angry at Viking. "Dude only ever over-shares when it's about his cock."  
I took that to mean that Viking did not impart basic or important information or did not like to talk about relevant things. I disagreed but did not speak up.  
"Where are we?"  
"Vike's cabin. Look, I've got shit to do and really fucking hate your guts. I'll be over in the living room."  
"Why do you hate me?" I asked even though I did not really want to know.  
The man looked me in the eye. His were so dark they were almost black. "'Cause you're the cunt that almost got Maddie killed," he said.  
He did not wait for an apology or an explanation. I had none to give, anyway. No meaningful ones.  
"Name's Ash. If you need anything, get it your fuckin' self and stay out of my sight."  
He left. A few minutes later, I heard his voice from across the cabin. He was speaking on the phone with someone. I could not make out his words.  
I lay back on the bed and curled up with the blanket, clutching my gurgling, heavy stomach. I was wearing a papery, mint-green garment that I did not remember putting on and which smelled badly of unwashed body, but I did not dare take it off. It and the blanket were not enough to keep me warm.  
From the open door, the eerie yellow eyes kept watch.  
I shivered myself to sleep.  
 _You'll be fine_ , he had said.  
He had not said _when_.

Many days passed by. I ate and drank whatever Ash left for me on my nightstand, crawled to the bathroom which was fortunately just around the corner – the journey still took half a lifetime and sapped my strength and would have damaged my dignity if I had had any left – and slept in shorter bursts.  
I realized that the yellow eyes were not in my imagination but belonged to a very large brown dog. I wondered if it was the same I had seen in the videos and photos Vike had shown me. There was a rolling growl deep in its chest whenever I was near, so I stayed out of its way as much as out of his master's.  
Eventually, I managed to stand on my two feet, and then even walk around, holding on to every wall, shelf and dresser I could reach. When Ash went out, banging the door behind him and leaving in a burst of thunder from his motorcycle, I looked around the cabin. It was smaller than a cabin for a man as tall as Viking should be, I thought, but comfortable. On first glance, it seemed cluttered, but I quickly realized that that was not the case. It was full, true, but every item was practical and _right_ exactly where it was, every piece of furniture, every rug, every appliance, every tool and lamp hanging from the ceiling or the walls, every cable running between the floorboards seemed to have its place and its use. Even the chaos that Ash left over the table and part of the floor in the living room, comprised of thick books full of symbols and papers full of scribbles and electrical components made of plastic and metal components, had its justification.  
The only thing that did not have a place here was me.  
I was an intruder who took from the pantry without asking and snooped through rooms and drawers because there was nothing else to do, except eating and sleeping. I missed my writing therapy diary, and the music, and card games. 2:30pm came and went, every day, and every day, nothing happened.  
One time, I woke up and there was a big cardboard box sitting in the doorway to the room I was sleeping in. It contained some clothes that fit me, previously worn but clean, a pair of shoes that would also fit me if I wore them with socks, a little plastic satchel with a comb, a toothbrush, toothpaste and a spool of floss, a notebook full of blank pages and a ball-point pen, a map that with a penciled-in X and the label 'Vike's' next it, a deck of playing cards, still in a clear plastic wrapper, and four books. I laid all things out on the bed and looked at them.  
They were simultaneously a great treasure and a poor substitute that hurt me in my chest. I was starting to understand that this ambiguity of things was waiting for me everywhere now.  
For a moment, I felt so homesick it made me dizzy. Not for the commune, just for that time in the past where I had my place and my mind had been clear and one-track.  
I reached for the biggest book and began to read.

/

It was the third day I had left the cabin. My legs were wobbly and I often had to catch my breath, but I pushed myself. With the help of the map, I had found a shallow river, maybe a quarter mile from Vike's cabin, that was easy to walk along and easy to use as a point of reference so I could find my way back. I walked a few slow steps into one direction, found a place to sit down, catch my breath and listen to the gurgle of the river, the rush of the wind in the trees and the noises of the animals, then walked back. I could walk from one tree to the next to steady myself whenever my feet wanted to give out.  
The scenery was beautiful, dusty as it was. The colors seemed bleached in the sunlight.  
I looked down at my lap and at the heavy book I had brought along this time. I had been reading it for many days and nights already. It was one of the four I had found in the box. It was clearly unused and unloved. The brittle pages had stains and dog ears and the spine had lost its cardboard cover so that the stringy skeleton of glue showed.  
"What are you reading?" a voice from behind me asked and I jumped half a foot.  
I turned around to see a boy, maybe eight or nine years old, standing between the trees and watching me. He held a large, gnarled piece of wood in his hand, its tip digging into the soft earth by his feet. The boy was tall and broad-shouldered, clad in a short pair of dark-gray jeans and a white sleeveless top that was smudged with dirt and sweat. His brown hair was shorn almost to the scalp which made his ears stick out. His eyes squinted at me.  
I remembered his face from a photo on Viking's phone. He had had a plaster around his arm and a bloodied nose.  
He was the first human being I had talked to in—weeks, now.  
"I am reading the Holy Bible," I answered, then added, "and you should not sneak up on people. You gave me a fright." My voice was not so reedy anymore, but talking loudly still took an effort.  
He shrugged instead of apologizing and stared at me for a few long moments.  
"Can I—Can I help you with anything?" I asked. His straight gaze made me uneasy.  
"You're not a club slut," he half-asked, half-stated.  
To hear a word like that fall from the mouth of a child that young took me by surprise.  
I remembered what a 'club slut' was. I had seen those women when I had been at the Devil's men's compound, them and their greedy, hollow eyes and all their flesh on display.  
"No," I eventually responded. "I guess I am not." Recalling Ash's expression, I muttered. "Although some might disagree, or call me worse."  
The boy and I looked at one another. I waited for him to say something else, or perhaps leave me be, but he just huffed and shuffled over toward me. I watched as the stick in his hand cut a vicious-looking groove into the soil, and so I was surprised to find him standing right before me and grabbing at my Bible with his other hand.  
"Don't!" I pleaded. My voice was suddenly hysterically high-pitched. I held on to my book with both hands as he pulled from the other side with his grubby fingers. "Stop it! You are smudging the pages!"  
"Let me see," he said and dropped the stick to also put both hands on the book. The fragile paper crinkled and tore in two places.  
The next moment, I was on my feet, with my Bible pressed protectively to my chest, and the boy was on his back on the ground before me, looking up at me.  
My heart seemed to shrink in fear. "Oh no…" I closed the mangled book and put it on top of the tote bag I had taken from the cabin to transport the book, then stepped towards him to try and help him back up. "Are you hurt?"  
"Don't touch me!" he yelled and rolled over and away from me before he got up again.  
"I did not mean to do this! You should not have grabbed my book without asking me," I defended against his gimlet-eyed glare that made me think he was about to attack me in retaliation. He might be young, but he was strong of body – probably stronger than me – and strong of will, and there was anger in him that scared me.  
Instead of leaping at me, he suddenly seemed to relax. He reached down onto his calf and wiped dirt and debris off his skin there, then moved upward to his back, his elbows and shoulders. He was scraped raw in some places. I gasped when I saw blood.  
"I'm gonna tell Lilah," he said.  
All at once, I knew this was a disaster. If Delilah was his mother, then his father was the vice-president of the club, the blond man with the angelic face and the Devil's grin. If the boy were to tell his parents about this incident, there would certainly be dire consequences. My already shrunken heart turned cold.  
"No! Please!" I begged. "It was an accident! I really did not-"  
"Jake!" A loud, female voice carried through the woods, not very far from us. Another call, male, rang out on the opposite bank of the river.  
It was clear that the boy standing before me was Jake, and the callers were his parents, searching for him.  
Jake gave an annoyed grunt and picked the stick up again. He turned to me, lifted and pointed the stick right at me like a rapier. "Get rid of them."  
"Pardon?" I was shocked.  
"You heard me," I said. "I don't want them to find me. If they do, I'm gonna tell them what you did. So get rid of them."  
"Jake! Where are you!?" Delilah's voice was closer to us now.  
Jake smirked at me and sat down on the rock that I had perched on before, then displayed the scrapes and scratches on his skin as if to give me more incentive. Beads of blood had formed on them, peppered with dirt.  
"Jake! Answer me, please!"  
I had no choice. I grabbed my bag and my Bible and hurried off towards Delilah's voice.  
"Hello?" I called back when I saw the first flash of her white clothes between the trees.  
"Who's there?" she asked back as I came into view.  
She froze and then recognized me. "Sarai." It was clear she had already known I was here, near her home. Perhaps Ash had told her. She was neither shocked nor surprised to see me, even if she had last seen me seven years ago and must have assumed I had perished in the ambush on the commune.  
Rather, she seemed disappointed.  
Maybe it was merely because I was not her lost son.  
I could not help but stare at her. She was all woman now, and beautiful despite the disfiguring scars that marked her face. Her hair was as short as a man's, but it only accentuated her femininity instead of subtracting from it. Her clothes, a white skirt and a black leather vest worn over a long-sleeved dark blue shirt, were revealing, accentuating the curves of her body. Most striking, however, was the air of certainty that seemed to surround her.  
She was a woman who was in her place. I realized it at once.  
She stared back at me for a moment, then blinked herself out of the stupor. "Have you seen Jake? He ran off maybe an hour ago. He often runs off to be by himself, but…"  
My heart beat in my throat. "Jake? I do not know… Is… Is he your son?" I should not know this, since I had never met him officially.  
"Yes," she said with force. "He is my oldest son."  
"Around eight years old? About this tall?" I held my hand up to my shoulder. "Very short dark hair?"  
"Yes!" She nodded eagerly with wide, hopeful eyes. "You have seen him?"  
"I think so," I confirmed hesitatingly. "I was… sitting by the river and saw him on the other side. He was walking along the bank and then vanished into the trees that grow right into the water. I called out to him but he did not react, or maybe he did not hear me."  
"When?" Delilah asked with urgency. "When was this?"  
"Perhaps fifteen, twenty minutes ago?" I replied, unsure whether my lie was realistic. "I—I mean, I have no watch to keep track of time, and I was absorbed-"  
Delilah interrupted me. "Which direction was he walking?"  
"He was coming from there," I pointed upstream with shaking fingers. "I mean, that was the way he was walking along the water, but when he went back into the trees, he just walked away from my vantage point and was soon out of sight, so I could not say for certain." I forced my mouth shut before my deception became too obvious.  
Delilah cupped forehead in frustration. "This child is going to be the death of me," she said and pulled a phone out of her pocket, dialed and called her husband. "Jake was spotted shortly before on your side of the river. Yes, just behind Vike's cabin," she informed him. "He was walking downstream and into the forest. Maybe he is going to the old tree stand again?" He answered something but I could not make out his words. Delilah nodded, sighed, nodded again. "Yes. Don't worry. … Yes, okay. … Alright. … I will." She lowered the phone and put it back into her pocket.  
I noticed that she had avoided the mention of my name.  
"Thank you, Sarai," she said. The gratefulness was obvious in her voice and her face, despite the scar that constantly contorted her expression. "I—I really appreciate your help. Please keep an eye out for Jake, will you? He could be anywhere, and maybe you happen across him on your way back… Please tell him that we are looking for him, that we are worried, and that we want him to come home."  
Her eyes were a liquid blue and shone with tears. The truth was on the tip of my tongue, but then I imagined her look when she saw that I had harmed her son, and swallowed it back down. Instead, I nodded and reassured her. "I will. I shall."  
She left to meet up with her husband, to search the wrong side of the river for Jake.  
I went a few steps into another direction, then doubled back to Jake and found him still sitting on the rock.  
"Your parents are worried about you, Jake," I accused him. "Why are you deceiving them like this?"  
"They aren't my parents," he said darkly. "They took me and my brother and sister away from my real dad. I'm going away to find him, and he'll come and get Harp and Griff."  
It felt like he had thrown cold water over me. "You were abducted?" I asked him, unbelieving. I thought about Delilah's insistent 'Yes, he is my son' and her professions of love and concern for Jake. I thought about the pictures and videos I had seen, full of happy children. Jake had not been in many of them, or perhaps I did not remember him.  
Then I thought of blonde, fair Delilah and her blond, blue-eyed Devil of a husband. Jake's hair was dark brown and his eyes were hazel.  
Jake shrugged his shoulders again, then squinted at me and jerked his chin. "You got a phone? Money?"  
"I—no. I only have my Bible." I pulled the book, wrapped in the bag, to my chest again.  
I had never wondered about not having a phone or money before.  
Jake obviously wanted both of these things to try and get away from his parents and the MC.  
Should I ever want to escape, myself, they would be essential.  
They should have been in the box, along with the other essentials, no? Did Vike intentionally withhold the very things I would need to extract myself from this place?  
"What's the Bible about?" Jake suddenly asked. I could not read his face and thus could not say whether he was serious in his interest, or if he was merely joking. How could he not know what the Bible was about, after all? He was seven years old. At his age, I had been learning the Bible for four years already… even though it had been a very different book than the one I had just defended against his grasping hands. Some core tenets were the same, but the particulars often contradicted them and one another, and the language was vague. In truth, I was frustrated with every word.  
"It's… It is about many things," I answered hesitantly. He glowered, so I specified, "It is really a collection of… many smaller books, stories, prayers, poems and songs. They tell us about events in the past that had to do with… with God."  
"Any good?" He asked, tapping the big stick onto the floor. "Things about war?"  
"Uhm. Yes," I answered truthfully. "There are many stories about war in the Bible."  
He seemed pleased. "Real bloody?"  
"Well… Yes, I suppose so." There were many detailed descriptions of blood and gore, especially in the Old Testament. For me it was a natural part of the narration, but for some reason it still felt shameful to have to admit it to a seven-year-old.  
"Cool," he said with a smirk. "Lots of fucking?"  
I stared. Coming from a boy, the vulgarity I had gotten so used to from Vike sounded especially crass. "Jake, I—"  
He jumped off the rock. "Do you know the way to the road?"  
So he really wanted to escape his adoptive parents and the MC. All on his own.  
 _To save himself and his siblings from an environment he did not want to live in, where he learnt crude words and deceitfulness and an unhealthy interest in violence and sexuality._  
I clutched my Bible more tightly. "No, I do not know the way to the road."  
Jake scoffed like he thought I was lying to him.  
"But maybe I can still help you," I added hastily. I thought of the map even though I was not sure there were any roads marked on it – and even if there were, they might belong to the Devil's men. Their territory was large and patrolled by them – or it had been, seven years ago. I could not imagine that much of it had changed. "If you… If you give me some time, that is," I amended. "I do not have many resources at the moment. I am waiting for Viking to come back-"  
"Vike got shot in Mexico," Jake said.  
Everything seemed to come to a screeching halt: The pulse in my chest, the blood in my veins, the Earth under my feet.  
"What?" I asked, but my voice was only air.  
Jake shrugged his shoulders again. "I heard Ky talk on the phone."  
I turned and walked away as fast as I could, back towards the cabin. I heard Jake's voice calling after me, "You said you'll help!", but I did not call back. Halfway, the tote bag with the Bible in it fell from my grasp when I grabbed for a branch to steady myself. It tumbled down a short hill until it got caught in a brush, and I could not muster the strength to retrieve it.  
When I arrived at the cabin, my body was soaked in sweat even though I shivered inside and my feet cramped with every rubbery step. I called out to Ash, but the place was deserted. Heavily, I sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. I could not sleep, or eat, or drink, or read, or write. I waited.  
It must have taken hours. My heart did not slow its agitated beat the entire time.  
Finally, the thunder of a motorcycle engine rose in the distance. Ash? I almost wished it was not-  
And then another.  
And another.  
And another, all of them joining together and approaching like a storm front.  
I stifled a sob. Jake had spoken true, then. Vike was gone and now the Devils came to purge the foreign element from their lands.  
I got to my feet and moved to the window facing the main path leading up to the cabin. It was almost dusk. Headlights shone through the trees.  
I was not afraid of them. There was nothing they could do to me that had not already been done before.

/

 **TBC**


	17. Chapter 16

_**Viking**_

"Remind me to never fucking owe you one ever again." I clenched my teeth as I redressed the oozing gash in my thigh with gauze from Tanner's first aid kit. This would leave an ugly dent. I should've kept my tetanus shots up to date. And FUCK, it hurt. "You're so damn lucky I hang to the right. One scratch on the anaconda and I'd have kicked your asshole up your throat."  
The fact that Tanner didn't even react spoke volumes. He was sitting on his couch in his open-floor-plan-designer-furniture-balcony-overlooking-downtown-Austin apartment – the one none of the brothers knew about because we would have ridiculed him for it relentlessly, fucking yuppie – drinking high-end vodka from the bottle and watching me bleed all over his upholstery out of one bloodshot eye. The other was swollen shut.  
The sound of water spraying from the shower could be heard through the slightly open bathroom door. Adelita turned out to be a 5-foot-nothing ball-buster made of tits, ass, childbearing hips and attitude, all fire and spice and zero chill, but now that the wild chase was over and we were on American soil, she clearly wasn't so tough any more. Didn't want to be alone and locked in, not even in the bathroom. Didn't even care that we clearly heard her use the toilet.  
Tough, but spooked. That seemed so familiar.  
"Alright, then. Good talk," I snarked at Tanner and pulled my pants up. They were dirty, holey and stiff with dried blood, but I hadn't brought spare ones and I refused to ask Tanner if I could borrow one of his. He wore tight denim. Not enough third leg-room. "I'm going home. Let's not get together soon." My phone was dead after 270 pounds of Norseman had fallen onto it jumping out of the way of flying bullets, so the chances of him calling me were mercifully low to begin with. At least until I got Ash to repair it.  
"Styx is back," Tanner said casually, as if that wasn't big news at all. "Just so you know."  
"Since when?" I demanded, freezing in the middle of putting my cut back on. My ribs were bruised to shit and the taping I had put on didn't help much at all.  
For a moment, all that was completely forgotten, though.  
These last ten days, I'd focused entirely on the suicide mission I'd gone on with Tanner because I couldn't afford to do anything else. The brand-new bloody furrow in my thigh and the stinging pain zapping through my ribcage with every breath attested to the fact that any distraction would've been fatal. But now, Sarai crashed back into my mind like a meteor.  
"Better hurry," Tanner said by the way of an answer. "He's bound to hear about your bitch sooner rather than later. Ky's brood is all healed up again, too, and now that he doesn't have his hands full any more I'd wager he'll find the time to finish the last New Zionist. One of 'em will get to her."  
Through AK, Flame and Ash, because they would defend her.  
For me, they would.  
Right?  
AK and Flame had been in Atlanta with me. They knew the lengths I had gone to for Sarai. I'd had one short discussion with Ash, telling him her name and that I wanted him to look after her while I was gone.  
Was that enough of a dam against the massive grudge the Prez and the VP would be nursing, though?  
"Fuck," I swore, grabbed my stuff and hauled ass.  
I hadn't driven to Atlanta and raided a hospital, hadn't spent months in fucking El Paso and watching the onion that was Sarai peel herself down to her core, hadn't cut a naked near-corpse off a bed in the last Nazi shithole in Texas, just to have my own brothers take her away from me now.

/

My Fatboy was making bad noises by the time I pulled up to my cabin. It was dinged up badly, just as I. My leg had started oozing through the bandages six miles back.  
Both my bike and my leg would have to wait.  
I roared into the clearing, parking right next to a whole bunch of familiar machines. Looking over, I saw that there was a weird stand-off happening in front of my cabin door.  
Styx and Ky looked like a couple of executioners on the way to a job. AK, Flame and Ash were there, just as I had hoped, but they weren't standing in the Prez' and Ky's way so much as standing by, holding them off for a while without actually driving them away.  
Passive resistance. Ghandi would've been _so_ proud.  
Cowboy, Hush, Tank and Smiler were there, too, for no obvious reason except to gloat, I presumed.  
All eyes were on me, not one pair especially friendly.  
Stiffly, I got off my bike and walked over to them, catching a slight movement of the curtains in the living room window in the corner of my eye. If it weren't for my fucked-up ribs – and the mighty pissed-off men glaring at me – I would have breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn't too late.  
"You totally could've started the campfire without me, boys," I said to no one in particular. As casually as possible, I checked if my Glock was still in my belt. It wasn't. Fuck. "I've got enough marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers in the pantry. We could make smores until we puke rainbows."  
"Cut the shit, Vike, and start explaining. Fast," Ky snarled. _He_ hadn't forgotten his Glock, I could see it from here.  
"Or what?" I challenged, crossing my arms over my chest. _Bad idea!_ my ribs screamed, but there were worse things on Earth than a little pain right now.  
 _Or we drag her out here and hear_ her _explanation,_ Styx signed, adding some gestures for 'cunt' to every 'her'. _Very,_ very _briefly._  
Alright. Enough.  
"I fucking dare you," I replied, and Styx came at me and hit me in the face with his fist faster than I could think.  
Fucking. Ow.  
My lower jaw did something weird and all my teeth seemed to rattle around in my mouth. I staggered and went down on one knee, spitting blood and saliva onto the ground.  
"Prez," I heard AK say with that patient voice, and Styx turned to him to speak with his hands. Good. That meant they were too busy to pummel my face with them.  
I got back up, shaking off the reverberation from the punch, and looked around the clearing. Nine. Nine grown, armed men against one girl. Un-fucking-real.  
I went eye to eye with Styx. The Prez was livid.  
Perfect. So was I.  
"Sarai is my Old Lady," I heard myself saying. "I'm claiming her."  
Fuck me, it was like saying ' _The sky is blue_.'  
Styx narrowed his eyes and looked ready to detonate.  
"You've got to be shitting me," Ky yelled and spat in my direction on the ground.  
"Vike, don't," AK started with that same warning tone he always used as the voice in my head, but this time he could go to hell.  
"I. Am. Claiming. This woman." I shouted out every word so every fucker in the crowd could hear me. "Sarai is mine! Any one of you shitheads got a problem with that, he better speak up now or forever hold his fucking peace. But better pick your words very goddamn carefully. I've had a crap month, a crap week, and an especially crap day even before meeting you, and the Prez' right hook has knocked out the very last fuck I had to give."  
I met the eyes of each of my brothers, feeling mutinous. Man, I was fucking _done_ with this day. I hadn't slept, been blindsided, beaten with a crowbar by a bunch of Mexican gangsters, shot at, just plain _shot_ , chewed out by a preggo Latina hobbit, now hit in the face with what had felt like an anvil, my bike was unhappy, and now half the MC had convened in front of my cabin, all of them so fucking butthurt. I wanted a shower, something hot for dinner, and my bed, and I wanted to see Sarai's face which I hadn't seen in ten long fucking days.  
"Vike, that cunt is a murderer who helped abduct-"  
" _You think I don't know that?!_ " I cut Ash off – fucking hell, and I had assigned him to watch over her, thinking that he was basically the only one who might be neutral on her, since he hadn't been part of the MC yet when all that shit went down, dammit! – and laughed without humor. "I know shit about this bitch that would give you fuckers nightmares. And I _still_ claim her. If you want her gone, you're gonna have to kick _me_ out of the MC. And kick me _hard_. Fuck knows I'm not leaving willingly."  
I looked around again, able to count on one finger the brothers who were my senior in terms of membership. Smiler had been a prospect before me – probably since he was old enough to open a beer bottle – and got his patch a couple of months before me. All the others had come later, even the Prez, who was close to ten years younger than me and had basically still been in diapers when I had earned my patch.  
Not that mere years counted for much. But years, coupled with pints of blood spilled and miles walked on broken glass for the club – that should fucking count for something.  
Still, my heart beat in my fucking throat. Hangmen didn't fuck around when it came to their old ladies. And Hades knew my old lady had fucked up hard by causing harm to Mae, Lilah, Maddie, Phebe and Bella. This could all go sideways easily. My brothers wanted revenge, for the ladies, and for the club as a whole. Fuck, I could understand them to a degree.  
"You want your pounds of flesh for your bitches? You take it from _me_ and be fucking done with it," I gritted out and cracked my knuckles to let them know that that pound would not come cheap. After all, if Sarai herself were to take that punishment, she wouldn't go down quietly without a fight, either, no matter how many 6-foot-tall men were coming at her. And just standing there and taking it wasn't my style, either.  
"You think we're gonna let a murderous, fanatic cunt like her live next to the kids?" Ky asked, stepping forward. "She fiddled little girls, just like her creepy ass prophet. Hurt them. Killed them. No way I'm letting _that_ near any of my children. Not to mention Li herself-"  
"Oh _no_ , a fanatic murderer, you say?!" I exclaimed and mimed shock and surprise with an o-mouth, clutching my imaginary pearls. "In _this_ MC? Goodness gracious me, how would she _ever_ get along with _any_ one here?!"  
"Vike-" AK tried again, bless his black fucking soul. I ignored him and kept talking to the VP.  
"Listen, Ky. I'm gonna give you the address of a real good dentist in El Paso, 'cause you're gonna need one if you ever refer to my old lady as a 'that' again," I promised him, and everyone within earshot. "Sarai is not a 'that', nor a 'cunt', and not a pedo. She had the fucking misfortune to grow up in the same cult that got so deeply into _your_ old lady's brain that she shot Flame in the neck and carved up her own face 'cause she was convinced she was evil incarnate."  
Ky panted with rage. He didn't like to be reminded.  
"Sarai's been brainwashed just as the other five, worse than all of them combined, and did things she shouldn't have, and wouldn't have. But even if she is a monster, she's _my_ monster. We make a matching fucking pair, then. You don't want her running loose? Fine. I'll keep her on a fucking leash, if it helps you sleep at night. But at the end of the day, she ain't going anywhere without me, and I ain't going anywhere except in a coffin, so you better fucking kill me in my sleep, or you learn to fucking deal with it."  
There was a moment of silence after that declaration.  
Cowboy snorted, shook his head and murmured "drama queen" under his breath. I smirked at him and puckered up to blow him a kiss.  
Styx lifted his hands. _Midnight_ , was all he gestured before he glared at my cabin window one last time, got on his bike and rode off.  
"I'm looking forward to it," I yelled after him, then looked around at the eight remaining men. I had nothing to say to them.  
I went inside and closed the door behind me.  
She was sitting on the floor with her back propped against the wall and looked at me with large eyes.  
Fuck me, had her face always been that gorgeous?  
My old lady.  
Holy. Fucking. Shit.

/

 _ **Sarai**_

The men had been standing outside for just a few minutes, talking in low voices, smoking cigarettes, flicking butterfly knives open and shut.  
I had waited for them to come in and get me.  
They did not.  
I did not understand why. The wait was torture.  
Then I heard his voice. I saw his face. My knees buckled and I could not get up again. I sat with my back against the wall below the window and hugged my legs to me, praying I would not hear gunshots and death cries, ashamed that I did not have the courage inside me to get up and stand next to him.  
Noises of motorcycles rose and faded away quickly as men left.  
The door opened.  
He came in, smiled at me like a sunrise, and collapsed.  
My heart seized again, in abject fear this time, and I was by his side before I could even think about the effort it would take to get up from the floor and run over to him, and whether or not I would be able to do so.  
"You are bleeding." I noticed the smell first, copper pennies, mixed with iodine that stung in my nose. Only after that I noticed the wet gleam along his leg, and the hole in the fabric of his pants through which a blood-soaked bandage showed.  
"'Tis but a scratch," Vike replied, then gave a groan and leaned his head back against the wood of the door. "Never mind, that was a Monty Python quote. Actually, it's more than a scratch and it hurts like a bitch. You don't happen to know anything about needlecraft, do you?"  
"I do," I replied truthfully. Sewing had never been my favorite pastime but my mother had taught me thoroughly.  
Vike seemed surprised. "Really?" he asked, and I nodded. "Shit, I don't know my old lady at all, do I?"  
I did not know how to answer that. Of all the people in the world, he was probably the one who knew me best now.  
"There's a kit in the bathroom under the sink, and a full bottle of Jim Beam over there in the pantry. Get both of them for me, will ya?" I nodded. "Attagirl," he said and smiled again, a pained but genuine expression.  
I fetched the two items. The small plastic trunk was surprisingly heavy and the lid sprang open explosively when I touched the latches. Inside, gauze and bandages were tightly packed on top of useful items such as scissors, tweezers, wipes, a thermometer, a small bottle of distilled water and several different antiseptic creams and painkillers.  
Vike took the bottle from me, unscrewed the top, took several deep gulps and wiped his mouth with his arm.  
"Now, for the next part, you're gonna have to pull down my pants."  
I thought he seemed very surprised when I immediately got to work unfastening his belt buckle. "An eager beaver," he commented. I did not understand his meaning although I could guess. He snorted at my dark look and took another drink from the bottle. "And they say romance is dead, eh?"  
I helped him wriggle down the fabric of his trousers until the bandage around his left thigh was uncovered. Without being prompted, I took the scissors from the kit and cut the soaked gauze off.  
The wound was considerable. I cleaned it as best I could with the distilled water and the wads of cotton from the kit, put on the rubber gloves, then took the needle and thread, which Vike disinfected with a swig of his whiskey, and got to work.  
Vike groaned low and laid his free hand loosely on my shoulder – not to hold me back. More to hang on to something. "Y'know, when I imagined you at work close to my junk, I had something entirely different in mind." After that, all he said were expletives and wordless noises. I worked as quickly and cleanly as I could and really tried to ignore the aforementioned body part, and the sheer size of his thighs, and the warm smell of his body that was noticeable even underneath the sharp odor of blood.  
Nineteen stitches. I considered my handiwork, cleaned around it with water, added some petroleum jelly and re-covered it with a loose, non-sticky bandage. "Done," I told him and his gaze crashed into me when I lifted my face to look at him.  
"How've you been?" he asked. Somehow he managed to put _every_ thing into that question.  
"Lonely," I replied truthfully. He winced and did me the favor of not lying to be about how that would change now that he was here. I was not that stupid or naïve.  
"Ash been treatin' you good?" he asked, expression stormy. "He's been a bit of an ass, hasn't he? Prick. Did he get you the stuff I told him he should?"  
I nodded and looked down on myself. The soft, stretchy pants and the thick cotton sweatshirt inundated my thin body, at least three sizes too large, but they also kept me warm. "Thank you for-"  
"No," he spoke over me. "No thank yous for things I owe you anyway. Same thing as with mind-blowing orgasms. Just smile." My ears grew hot. I smiled. "Much better."  
His hand was still on my shoulder, gently kneading me there through my shirt.  
"What will happen now?" I asked and tried to, likewise, put everything I could not say into it.  
"Next couple days will be rough. Gotta take that shit little by little," he said, then scoffed at his own words. "Fuck me, I sound like Doctor McGowan."  
He did, a little.  
"For the moment, I'll just pass out right here if you don't mind." He pulled up his pants again, very slowly and carefully to not dislodge the bandage or jostle the tender stitches underneath, but left the buckle open. "Been a bitch of a day, for the most part. Just fucking glad to be home."  
After that, he slurred some more words, then his head dipped to the side and his hand fell from my shoulder.  
I got the blanket and pillow from the bedroom to try and make him more comfortable.  
In his position he snored quite loudly but I did not mind. I curled up next to him, close enough to feel the body heat radiating from him, and closed my eyes, wondering what being an 'old lady' meant.

/

 _ **Viking**_

My bladder woke me, and just in time. The big digital clock on the living room wall that I could see from here said I had a date in half an hour.  
Sarai was right next to me and I reached for her automatically. Her hair was so fucking soft.  
She startled from the touch and sat up like a jack-in-the-box. "Is everything alright?" she asked. Her pale face seemed to glow in the darkness.  
Pretty sure there was some sort of biker bible, and one of the ten commandments in it was 'Don't have your old lady sleep on the floor, you asshat.'  
"Fine. Gotta go pee, though, and put you to bed."  
She hesitated before nodding. "Okay."  
I chuckled. "Don't worry, sugarbun. I'm not in the right shape for _putting you to bed_ properly." Not yet. Wouldn't be long, though. "Tonight's just for sleeping."  
She hesitated again. Fuck me, I wish I could see her face properly right now. Her ears were probably bright red. "Okay," she said again.  
"Gonna roll over, real graceful," I warned her and heaved my body around until I was on my side, then on my belly, then on all fours and eventually close to upright.  
Ow. Ow. Fucking Mexicans.  
In the meantime, she had gone and taken away the blanket and pillow she must've fetched for me earlier, and switched on the bathroom light for me, and now she stood by my weaker left side as if she could prop me up if my leg gave out.  
A fucking treasure. That's what she was.  
Pressing bathroom business finished, I trudged to my bedroom to find it empty. With a huff, I went to the other bedroom where she was sitting on the edge of the mattress like some sort of virginal bride on her wedding night waiting for her husband to come and do his duty.  
Despite my earlier statement, my cock came to life in my pants. _Down, boy._  
"This is the guest bedroom, sugar," I told her. "You ain't a guest. Get your sweet ass over into my bed."  
She stole past me on bare feet and it took all my willpower to not grab her around the waist and pull her in to me. I followed the bob of that luscious little backside that even baggy tracksuit pants couldn't hide – _it was an upside-down heart. Sweet baby Jesus_ – into the master bedroom and gestured for her to slip under the covers.  
"I'm gonna clean up real quick. Don't wait up." I switched off the light and closed the door as if cutting myself off from the visual of Sarai in my bed would lessen the temptation.  
It didn't.  
Still, I went to the bathroom again, splashed some water in my face and braided my hair so it wouldn't get into my eyes, then redressed my thigh and ribs extra-tight, and swallowed half a handful of ibuprofen. Then I pulled open the cupboard in the living room and chose a couple of weapons – my good old knuckle dusters, the ones christened with Nazi blood, a switchblade knife, and the massive Desert Eagle .50. I would probably only use the first of the three, but this was about making a statement. Which is also why I donned my cut again, and set out toward the big barn ten minutes early.  
Because my brothers knew me too well, they were already there when I entered and pulled the door shut behind me with a mighty clang.  
Yeah, they were there. All of them. The barn practically stank of testosterone and bloodlust.  
I counted fifteen, but the barn was too dark in the corners to say for sure. Styx and Ky stood in the dim light from the overhead lamp, the other brothers kept in the shadows. I spotted AK, Flame and Ash on the far right, claiming the area behind me. Their body language said they wouldn't participate, except by covering my back, but they also wouldn't stand beside me and fight.  
Someone had actually preached Ghandi while I was gone, apparently.  
Fucking Ghandi.  
"Evening, girls," I quipped at the Prez and Ky and demonstratively pulled out the big ass revolver from my belt, then handed it over to Ash. My quasi-little brother took it along with the angry look I gave him. He and I were gonna have a word about treating guests at my house and jumping to conclusions.  
"You're still claiming the snake?" Ky asked.  
"Hell yeah," I replied easily. "Finders keepers."  
Someone coughed a word that sounded a lot like 'dipshit'. I grinned into the shadowed crowed, showing my teeth. "Such bravery on display in this MC! First, all of you simultaneously get your periods because of one little girl, and now you stand back and let mommy and daddy fight while you trash-talk from the sidelines. Redefining the word _audacious_ , right there _._ "  
 _She's not a girl_ , Styx gestured, and I cut him off before he could start, quite predictably, with the whole abductor-murderer-rapist-fanatic shtick again. Shit was getting old.  
"That's right, she's a woman. My old lady. And she's in my bed right now, which is where I should be, too. Instead I'm here at the world's lamest sausage party. Can we get this show underway?" I looked from Ky to Styx and back again, then glanced at the dark crowd. "Two against one? You sure about that?" I had three inches on Ky, four and a half on Styx in height, several uncounted pounds on both in weight, and I had a fire in my guts that felt hot enough to burn the whole fucking MC down right now.  
Another man stepped out of the shadows.  
He did not sport a cut. Hadn't in seven years.  
I swear I felt my fucking eyes rolling into the back of my head.  
"Oh, you are. _Fucking._ _Joking_ ," I spoke to Styx and Ky and gestured with a single, humorless laugh. "Him?! You're inviting _him_ to avenge the harm that was done to your bitches and the treason against this club by a member of a certain doomsday cult? The irony. It _burns_."  
Styx and Ky didn't answer because of course they wouldn't.  
Fucking _Rider_ regarded me evenly with his smug fucking visage and took his place next to Prez and VP.  
"Fuckheads. Unbelievable," I scoffed quietly and pulled the knife from my boot, then slid it over to Flame. He'd keep it safe for me. "Well, then. At least there's a doctor right nearby, just in case someone needs a band-aid. Is the boy band complete, then?" I looked at the audience, but no one else came forward. "You three knobs against little old me?" I slid my brass knuckles on and wriggled my fingers to adjust them. "Fun."

/

I didn't remember how I made it home. One moment, I was out, the next I grabbed for the door handle – missed twice – and practically fell into my cabin. Or rather, the cabin floor came up and smacked me in the face. Eh, what was one more?  
I decided to just lie there and have a nap. Not that it was my choice, really.  
Faintly, I heard my bedroom door open. Her gasp and the soft 'No! Viking!' drove a needle through my heart.  
I wished I could spare her the sight of me like this.  
Then again, I hoped she took a good, long look and saw all the stuff I didn't quite know how to put into words.

/ ****

 **TBC**


	18. Chapter 17

_**Sarai**_

I was glad he was passed out. I could reset his fingers without causing him too much pain. The noise his bones made as they slid back into their place launched vomit into my mouth and tears to my eyes. I taped the two fingers until they were rendered immobile.  
I had cleaned the sweat and grime off his skin, stitched the small but oozing gash over his eyebrow, made an incision in the shell of his ear to drain the blood that was accumulating there and blowing the cartilage up like a cauliflower, bandaged him, applied salves and put cool gel pads and bags of frozen vegetables from the refrigerator on his swollen ribs. Whenever he stirred in his stupor, I made him drink water and swallow medicine.  
Still, it was not enough. Not nearly. He was too large and heavy. I could not put him in bed, I could not even move him away from the door enough to close it. He was lying halfway across the threshold. Turning him from his side onto his back had been all I could do.  
The stitches I had put in his thigh had ripped open and I did not have a pair of scissors small and sharp enough to repair them, and the thread I had left was also hardly enough – and even if I had all those things, my hands were shaking too much. The bruises on his torso looked so vicious I was scared he was bleeding internally. There was a lump on the side of his head the size of a goose egg. It worried me.  
But I could only sit by and watch him.  
Never in my life had I felt so helpless and despaired.  
The sun came up and hours went by. I changed the gel pads, re-applied salve, felt his skin – was he burning up or were my hands just cold? – and I prayed. I prayed and prayed.  
Just before midday, after five or six hours, a large car pulled up to the cabin. Ash came in through the open door, stepping over Viking's legs to get in. He gave Viking, who lay prone in his black leather vest and his underwear because I had cut the rest of his clothes from his body with the big pair of scissors and a carpet knife, a once-over, then looked over at me.  
I studied the man's hands. There were no bruises on his knuckles, unlike on Viking's. That did not mean anything, however. He might have used tools and weapons to beat him instead.  
The thought made a surge of hate flare up inside me, so fierce that Ash must have seen it in my face. He flinched away from me imperceptibly.  
He went to get a small carpet from the corridor, laid it down right next to Vike's upper body and ordered me to push it underneath him when he rolled Viking onto his side and back.  
Ash then dragged the carpet across the floor to move Vike's heavy body. I held up his legs by the heels of his boots, wary of how much damage the movement caused to the gash in his thigh.  
Eventually, we were in the bedroom. Ash maneuvered Vike into a sitting position first, then had me lift his legs again and pulled his upper body onto the mattress in a judo-like maneuver. Vike groaned but did not wake up. I fetched blankets, towels and pillows and everything else that might be needed to stabilize him, and deposited every packet of analgesic medicine I could find on his night stand. Ash moved his heavy limbs around until he was spread-eagled and as comfortable as he could be, then threw a light blanket over him.  
"I'm gonna get some more dressing and shit," Ash said, and that bored, even tone finally made me snap.  
When Ash walked – ambled – outside to get into his car, rummaging his deep pants pockets for a lighter to go with the cigarette he had crammed between his lips, I ran after him.  
"Take me to your president."  
He turned around. His eyebrows went up a notch. _Finally_ he lost a little of his calm, I noted with satisfaction.  
I released the safety catch on the Beretta 96 and repeated, "Take me to your president."  
"That's a very, very stupid move," Ash started to say, but I did not let him finish. I fired a round into the sky – the recoil thumped me in the shoulder – then lowered the gun again, re-aimed it at his legs.  
He gave a sort of long-suffering sigh, took the cigarette from his lips and put it into his pocket. "Don't say I didn't warn you."  
Minutes later, I was in the passenger seat of his truck. We drove along the dirt road that I had always avoided because the map had shown that that was the way to the compound, and I had not wanted to go anywhere near that place.  
"You know that the one who's going to be most pissed about this crap right here is Vike, right?" Ash asked. He seemed unconcerned that I was still aiming the gun at him, now at quarters so close that I could hardly miss even if I tried. "When he hears about the shit you've been up to, he's going to go apeshit. And rightfully so. You're his old lady now."  
I was still not sure what being an 'old lady' even entailed. It was not relevant at that moment, however.  
"Who knows if Viking will even remember who I am, after the punishment you have handed out to him," I retorted and wrestled down the angry tears that threatened to cut off my air and my voice. "He has been unconscious for almost six hours. You hit his head hard enough to cause a swelling. He has bled from his ears. Who knows if he will even wake up?" I remembered the story about his father and what had become of him. I remembered the months, maybe years that were still missing from my own memory between the day of the ambush on New Zion and the day I had blinked myself awake in a white bed for the first time, something that had to do with the gnarled scar and the dent on the back of my head.  
"He will," Ash assured me, glancing over at me and then looking back to the road. "With a massive headache, to which you're currently adding. He's got a thick skull and knows how to take a beating."  
"He should not have had to take this beating. At the hands of his own brothers." I spat the word.  
"He knew what he was gettin' into when he claimed you. At least on the MC front. On his-" he gestured toward me, sitting there and pointing a gun, "-front, though, not so much, I think."  
Perhaps that was true. Perhaps Viking did not know what I was capable of. He had only ever seen me weakened and sedated.  
"This whole thing is just shit timing, overall," Ash continued. "Prez got a new baby, Mae's more vulnerable, so of course he's not keen on bringing more instability to the club right now. Ky's got his hellion who's making life difficult for him and Li, so they're also unusually thin-skinned, and that was before all of their munchkins got the pox." He huffed. "It's like a goddamn telenovela over here. Just with the occasional club run."  
I did not know what a telenovela was. Still, I understood his point.  
We went up a short driveway and a large cabin appeared between the trees. Ash parked behind another truck, a motorcycles, and two bicycles.  
He switched off the engine and the truck went silent.  
"You know, they've still got nightmares sometimes."  
I felt Ash looking at me but I looked out the windshield instead, at the two bicycles. One of them was so bright green it stung the eyes, the other was matte black and slightly smaller. Both were speckled with dirt. Both were clearly children's bikes, made for six-year-olds maybe.  
"You probably weren't the worst offender, but you're complicit in it nonetheless. A symbol for a dark past they're all trying to forget but can't."  
I could not suppress a bitter laugh. Past. Nothing was ever past. "Then you should have taken your revenge on me, not on Viking." That was exactly why I was here.  
"Two birds, one stone, hitting the bigger one first." He shrugged and glanced at the Beretta that was still loosely in my hand. "If you must go in there, leave the fucking gun. You go in _without_ it, you'll make an ass outta yourself, Prez will be grumpy, and Vike'll put you over his knee afterwards, that's all." He clicked his tongue. "You go in _with_ it, you ain't coming out alive, and that's a promise."  
He met my eyes and I knew he was speaking the cold truth.  
I looked at those two bicycles once more.  
I lowered the weapon and re-engaged the safety, then dropped the gun in the passenger door side pocket.  
Ash took an audible, deep breath.  
"For what it's worth… This here…" He gestured at me, encompassing my demeanor and the way my heart was knocking in my chest with rage. "Gets you a couple of brownie points on my ledger. You've got balls, and you get angry on behalf of Vike, no matter how misguided that is, which shows me that you're serious about him." He sighed. "That said, you're a clueless, hysterical pighead who's serious about the least serious man I've ever known, so there's some completely useless fucking drama right here. Also, I don't appreciate being forced to do anything at gun-point. So there go your brownie points." He stiffened. "And here comes trouble."  
I followed his eyes and saw Salome standing in the doorway, watching us intently. Or rather, watching me.  
"Crap. Now it's a fucking thing," Ash muttered. His cigarette made a re-appearance. "Get outta my truck. This is your shitstorm to deal with."  
I took a deep breath and exited the truck. As soon as my feet touched the ground, Ash started the engine and drove off.  
There we stood for several minutes. Salome swayed a little on her feet as she held a bundle to her chest and rocked it. I assumed this was the newborn baby Ash had mentioned.  
She was the same as Delilah. A woman, mature, at peace.  
Loved.  
"I came to talk to your husband," I explained. Suddenly, I felt young and foolish in comparison to her. She was, what, four, five years older than I? Still, she seemed like a lioness, and I like a yet-featherless little bird that did not even know whether it would become a pidgeon or an eagle when it was grown.  
"He is not here," she said. "I assume the reason for his absence and the reason for your coming are related." She sized me up once, twice. "This has something to do with Viking, correct?"  
A lump formed in my throat. "Yes. Your husband and… and other so-called brothers have hurt him badly for—for sheltering me."  
"Claiming you as his old lady, or so I've heard. Which makes you a permanent fixture in all our lives from now on." She 'hmm'ed, a noise I could not interpret. "No wonder Styx was so very mad at Viking. For years, the men of this club have tried to save us from our bad memories. Styx, Ky, Flame, AK, Rider… they all want nothing more than to fight our demons for us. And here comes Viking and throws _you_ into the mix, undoing all of those efforts at once."  
I bit my lip. A demon. It was an apt term. Deserved. Earned.  
And it hurt. For myself, and for Viking. I was tainting him by association.  
"Do you want to come inside? I've got coffee, tea, some leftovers I can nuke for you. Heat up in the microwave, I mean."  
I startled. "Why?" Why would she invite me into her home?  
"Because you look like you're about to keel over. When was the last time you ate?" When I did not answer, she cocked her head. "Come on. I've got this existential urge to feed absolutely everyone right now. Must be the hormones. Humor me." Very slowly, with a rocking swing in her step and some baby talk to her little child, she walked through the door and vanished inside her cabin.  
I could stand around in her front yard and look foolish or I could follow her. So I followed.  
The cabin was considerably larger than Viking's. It smelled like freshly baked goods and baby powder and it was… chaotic. There were toys, clothing items and various other things on the floor and on every surface, and muddy paw prints on the carpet and the wooden floors.  
"No comment on the mess, please," Salome called from the kitchen where she poured two cups of tea. "Come, sit. Sugar?"  
I sat gingerly and shook my head 'no'. I did not think I could stomach anything right now, but I appreciated the warm mug which I could cling to.  
"How is Vike?" she asked with such innocent sincerity that it made me gnash my teeth.  
"Bleeding. Sleeping. Badly bruised. I do not have enough utensils and bandages to stitch him up and dress him properly." A voice in my head asked me what I was doing here, told me I should be by his side instead, but I barely heard it over the screech of shame and agony – _I could not help him. I caused every single one of his wounds and I could not mend him_ – and the shame morphed turned into anger.  
"Where is your husband? Is he coming home anytime soon?" I asked, somewhat more sharply than I had intended.  
"I do not know that," Salome replied, and added, "and even if I did, I would not tell you. Both for your sake and his. Please, sit down."  
I had gotten to my feet in agitation. "I want to speak to-"  
"No, you want to _argue_ with him," she spoke over me. "Make him angry, and make him hurt because you're both of these things right now. I even understand you, but I will not help you agitate him. He has more than enough on his plate as it is."  
"He tortured Viking!" I could not help it, my voice made crazy spirals.  
"I am sure Viking gave as good as he got, which is why my dear husband has not shown his face to me in daylight today." There was a spark of irritation in her voice, but she sighed and turned her face down to her baby.  
And she let go of her anger. Just like that.  
"You have to understand, Sarai. These men of ours, they are like thunderclouds. They must clash noisily, with lots of lightning and rain, so that there may be blue skies afterwards. It is their style of diplomacy. It has worked well for many years, despite the fact that matters were often complex, with feelings and hopes and dreams and money and _honor_ involved." She overemphasized the word 'honor' and rolled her eyes skywards to show what she thought about that particular concept. "Both Styx and Viking, and all the other men who were there, now consider this particular matter done and settled."  
'This particular matter' being _me_.  
"Now that the bulk of the passions are out of the way, they will endlessly negotiate over the details of our coexistence, one situation at a time, and as time goes by, we'll all see what will unfold." She gave me a small smile. "I, for one, hope that you will help keep Viking in a balance."  
I wrinkled my forehead. "I do not understand."  
She smiled and tilted her head again. "Viking's an _extreme_ man. He has mellowed considerably in the last years because of the children, but nothing changed about his basic nature. He is just… extremely _loud_ , usually. You know him."  
Something warm bloomed in my chest. I did. I did know him.  
"He is a third of a trio. Flame, AK and Viking. They used to be very close in every way. Now, however, Flame is a father of two, and AK's wife is recently pregnant. Many MC men in general have… reset their priorities as they get older. Viking has been a little… disoriented. Not exactly lonely, but something adjacent to it. It was bound to get worse soon, what with AK turning more and more toward his future child. But now there's you." She shrugged and sipped her tea.  
The warmth spread from my chest outwards. It made me nervous.  
"Salome-"  
"Mae." Her voice was suddenly unyielding. "My name is Mae. Mae Nash."  
Chastised, I tried to remember what I had meant to say but failed. I regarded the tea leaves swirling in my cup.  
"You know, not to toot my own horn, but I am the Prez' Old Lady. Kind of a big deal."  
Sal- Mae lifted her hand and mimicked adjusting a crown on her head with a winking eye and a small curl of her lips.  
"Therefore, in regards to your presence at this MC, starting now, you can consider yourself endorsed. And warned."  
I clenched my fingers more tightly around my cup and listened.  
I was afraid.  
"I will talk to Styx," Mae said. "I will slowly persuade him to ease up on you and Vike, and eventually, _very slowly_ , he will learn to tolerate you, and the others will gradually follow his lead. Eventually, if you play your cards right, you'll grow on us. Such is my endorsement."  
It was not much, but also confusingly much more than I had ever expected.  
"Now here comes the warning," she continued and made a point of looking me in the eye. "You will be the best gosh darn old lady for Vike. The _best_. You will be loyal and forbearing and honest and exactly right. You will be good for him."  
I did not know how to be _any_ of those things. My heart cowered in the face of this enormous task. I did not know where to start.  
Mae kept on talking. "You don't get to drive to the others' houses like you did mine just now. If they want to talk to you, they will do so in their own time, and they will let you know. In your own interest I suggest you don't try to go toe-to-toe with any of the men, either. Stay out of their sight. You will also make an effort to stay away from the children. If they come to you, you will be polite to a fault. Do you understand me?"  
A cold shiver raced up my spine. In this I had already failed. In all the chaos, I had almost forgotten meeting Jake by the river. Hurting him, however accidentally. Lying to Delilah. Leaving the boy there when I knew that he intended to run away, on his own, through the forest.  
"You will be on eternal probation in this MC. If you screw up – even just once, even just slightly – it will be on Viking to deal with you, and since that will probably break his heart, we're back at the first part of my warning. So, all in all, just don't screw up. Learn the rules, fast, and stick to them. You don't get a do-over, neither from my husband, nor from me. I will not allow you to ruin our lives any more than you already did once. Am I making myself clear?"  
I was numb and overwhelmed. I managed a jerky nod.  
Mae considered me for a long moment before nodding as well. "Stick with Viking. He's a good man. His bringing you here and defending his decision is a significant thing for him to do, probably more significant than he knows how to put in words."  
There was some silence, interrupted by small baby noises. Mae cooed to her newborn, resembling the Mother Mary holding an infant Jesus I had seen in a false Bible long ago.  
"Do you-" I started, but the words died in my mouth. Viking had already told me that there was no redemption. The question sounded so silly, even in my head.  
Mae's icy blue eyes saw through me and easily spotted the shame I tried to hide.  
"Do you mean to ask if this means I forgive you for what you have done?"  
I threw my heart into that one nod and hoped, for once, that Viking was wrong. That there was a way I could become clean, and maybe make him proud to have me.  
But Mae shook her head. "No, I do not."  
I bit my lip to stifle the cry that wanted out.  
"But this is the wrong question to ask me."  
"I do not understand," I had to admit.  
She seemed to have anticipated that and explained, "When you beg forgiveness, you ask someone to let go of their grudge against you. But I, for my part – and I am merely speaking for myself, mind you, not for any of the others – I have already let go of it. Long ago, in fact. I have let go of all the grudges against the people of my past who have done me and mine terrible wrongs." She pursed her lips. "Not only because most all of them have found themselves a rather agonizing death and have been cold in the ground for years, but also... Also because I found that when you hold a grudge too long, it starts holding you instead. And then it holds you back."  
Her eyes went distant for a moment. She was thinking of something or someone in particular. Then she sighed and gave me a wry smile. "I just do not have the energy or, frankly, the _time_ to keep it up. To keep pondering the past and the toxic people in it, the ones I have overcome many times over. I have two prepubescent boys and a demanding husband with a _killer_ stamina, and now a little girl who doesn't give a hoot about sleep cycles, and an ever-growing extended family on top of it. I need every drop of energy for greater things, you know?"  
She got up and went to the counter to reheat the water for another cup of tea.  
"Maybe, in a few years time when you have proven yourself worthy of Viking's trust, you can come by again and ask me whether I can _accept_ you and what you have done. Until then, I shall tolerate you, and will be in favor of others doing the same." She threw me a half-smile over her shoulder, and asked, "Are you sure you don't want tea? It's really good. Calms the nerves."  
I finally chanced a sip. The tea was almost cold and tasted of nothing.  
Before I had set it down again, a voice spoke up behind me.  
"This is the part where you say 'thank you' and leave."

/

I whirled around in my chair and saw a second Mae standing by the wall. She looked so much like Mae – same long, dark hair, flawless fair skin, bright blue eyes, even more beautiful if that was at all possible – I had to look back at the woman at the counter to check whether I was now entirely losing my mind. But no, there were two of them. Twins? I had not been aware-  
"I wish I could say _I_ don't recognize _you_ ," the second Mae said to me, and in the hard set of her mouth, I finally realized that they were two very different persons. Different personalities.  
This one did not tolerate me at all.  
"Sarai, I believe you have never met Bella as herself," Mae introduced her.  
Bella. Jezebel. The fourth Cursed woman of Eve? I thought she had died for disobeying Brother Gabriel? I had never seen her… or had I? Her face was familiar, even without the resemblance to Mae.  
"You knew me as Harmony," Bella said, her eyes stony and cold. "Last time you saw me, you prepared me for my ceremonial rape at the hands of Judah."  
The wedding. The dress. The prospect of my Prophet marrying a woman that was not me. The frustration and hatred and anger. It all came back to me.  
And Judah, too, came back to me.  
There he stood, next to Jezebel, and looked at me.  
My heart seemed to fall from my chest and crash to the floor.  
"Judah."  
I called his name, but he did not react to it. He turned his gaze on me.  
His eyes were all wrong. Not only because one of them was blackened by a bruise.  
Not Judah.  
Cain.  
I wanted to cry. Pain, despair, relief, all of it mingled inside me.  
Judah's twin brother.  
Judah's murderer? Viking had told me that Cain had ended his own brother's life that day, but I needed to hear it, I needed to _know_.  
"Did you kill him?" I asked. At some point, I had gotten to my feet again, holding on to the backrest of the chair I had sat on to steady myself. I swayed on them as the Earth turned too quickly underneath me to catch up.  
Cain's shoulders slumped, then straightened. He nodded. "Yes."  
The heart that had lain on the floor already broke open and oozed dark liquid.  
"It was you," my voice ran away from me. "You brought the Order down. You brought the Devils to our door and let them in. You ushered in the end."  
"Enough with this," Jezebel said, cutting into me with every word.  
"Bella, let's go outside with Rhia." Mae walked over to her sister and took her firmly by the arm. "Come on."  
I barely noticed how Bella and Mae, with her baby in her arms, went outside and left me and Cain standing across from one another.  
"I had to," he said. "There was no choice."  
"I know," I answered on a dry sob. "I know there wasn't."  
"It was right," he said, and this time I shook my head, and my whole body shook along with it.  
"No," I insisted, even when Cain repeated his words.  
" _It was right_ , Sarai. It was a sick animal. It should have been put out of its misery long before. It did nothing but hurt people."  
"You took my home away from me," I told him.  
He looked at me like he knew.  
Like he understood.  
He had no idea.  
"YOU TOOK MY HOME AWAY FROM ME!" something screamed from deep inside of me, using my mouth to be heard. "You destroyed it! It was a terrible place, but it was my home! Why did you have to- _Why?_ And Judah. You killed him. You killed him that day. He was a monster, I _loved_ him, he loved me. He truly loved me, for what I was, and you took him away from me!"  
Cain's eyes mirrored the pain I felt, but so much smaller, so much farther away than mine, making mine feel that much bigger and sharper. "He killed them all, Sarai. He would've kept going. He-"  
"I KNOW THAT!" I yelled at him. My voice frayed horribly at the edges. "He was a dreadful creature! He had to be stopped! But _why did you have to take him from me_? Why did you not send me _with him_? I am as dreadful as he ever was!"  
I saw it. The memory flitted across his face. He remembered me that day. He had seen me. He knew what had happened.  
"You forgot me."  
That hurt worse than any injury I had ever sustained. This knowledge that the sum total of all my agony was the result of one oversight, because I had not been important.  
"You forgot to kill me."  
Not important enough to die.  
Tears flowed down my face like twin rivers.  
"Someone pulled me out from between the corpses. I woke up in a white bed, with my legs spread open, and for _years_ that was all I was. Spread legs. Holes for unworthy, dirty men. A receptacle for fluids and urges. All around me, girls and women got to die, but I never did. I _always_ woke up again, more painful than before. Why? _Why!?_ You could have prevented it, I wanted you to, I _begged_ you to, why, why did you not hear me-!? "  
I could not even see him anymore, just a dark outline, and I could not breathe. My own tears were choking me so much my voice was only a whine now, like a dog's.  
"I just wanted my mom!" I sobbed. "I wanted to go _home_. I wanted to be with Judah. So many years- No one ever came to save me. Why!?"  
I heaved, sick from crying, but my stomach was empty except for a sip of cold tea and merely cramped, adding to the unbearable pain I held in me.  
"Sarai, I'm sorry." Cain said nothing else. Slowly, he came towards me and lifted his hands to touch my elbows, then gently tugged on them. I hardly even felt his embrace.  
"Get away from her."  
But I _did_ feel that voice.  
Down to my core, I felt it.  
"Viking, don't-" Cain started but was pushed out of the way.  
A rough hand spun me around and the strongest of arms hauled me up. I clung to him with the last dregs of my strength, wishing I could climb into him and hide there forever.  
I tucked my face into the crook of his neck.  
"I am sorry," I told him, and Cain, and myself.  
"I am sorry." I had just wanted my mom. For her to be proud of me. To be her princess.  
"I am sorry." I had wanted the man who loved me. For him to value and hold on to me even if he was not mine alone, even if he was destined for greater things than me.  
"I am sorry." I had wanted the place in the prophecy that promised a family, promised people divinity.  
Over and over, I screamed, "I am so sorry."  
All I had wanted was to be home.

/

 **TBC**


	19. Chapter 18

_**Viking**_

I sat up, leaned over and puked into the trashcan that stood by the nightstand. Mostly Jim Beam, mixed with a bit of blood. Curious thing about Jim, he sometimes burned more going down than coming back up.  
Note to self: Wait with the puking until the ribs were fully healed. The pain made almost made me nauseous again and I gasped like a fish on land.  
And _holy hell_ , my head hurt with every thought going through it. I touched the side of it and flinched back from dual pain. My head _and_ my fingers hurt.  
Oh. Right. Last night had been the unpleasant kind of 'wild'. Turned out, three on one was more uneven than I had counted on, especially with a _very_ pissed-off Ky in the mix. If I hadn't been busy coughing blood and not getting my ass killed by accident, I might've taken the time to ask Flame and AK if we could make him an honorary member of the Psycho Trio. Blondie had potential.  
My fingers were reset and wrapped in stiff bandages. I looked down on myself. I was naked except for my cut and my underpants, and pretty much every visible square inch of skin was bandaged, band-aided or taped. I looked like a cartoon mummy that had been run over by a lawnmower. There was a glass of water and a whole stack of pain pills next to it on the night stand.  
Sarai.  
"Sarai?" I called out. She wasn't next to me. That was probably for the best, what with the vomiting – not that I imagined she'd be prissy about something like that – but I still wanted her in my sight at least. "Sarai!"  
No answer.  
With some effort, I swung my legs off the bed – making sure not to knock over the trashcan – and got myself into an upright position, fumbled three or four tablets of Advil out of their bottle and downed them. Just to make sure my stomach wasn't doing an encore, I waited for a minute, then got up.  
"Sarai?" I called again, hobbling over to the other bedroom – empty – and to the bathroom – also empty. Kitchen and living room were also deserted. Damn it, where was my woman?  
I went back to the bathroom, gulped a couple of hollow hands of water down and swished a big cup of Listerine around my mouth. Better. I took the safety scissors from the kit under the sink and cut off a couple of the bandages because they limited my range of motion too much.  
Once that was done, I went to find myself some clothes. Couldn't go out and search for my old lady barefoot and in my undies.  
Turned out getting dressed was fucking complicated and painful with your body shot to shit, especially when you were in a hurry. Conquering my pants and lacing the boots had taken two goddamn eternities, so I threw on my cut – or rather, I gently slid it on in geriatric slow-motion – without a shirt. Let others get an eyeful of nasty bruises contrasting nicely with my milky white skin and ginger chest hair, I didn't give a fuck.  
"Vike!" Ash's voice rang out from outside. He barreled through the door carrying a very familiar Beretta 96 with him.  
"Your old lady is a fucking terror," he snarled and threw the gun into the dresser where I kept most of them, usually locked up so that curious munchkins couldn't get in there.  
"What the fuck crawled up your butt?" I asked him, annoyed that he was treating my guns like trash toys, and speaking in riddles – even though Sarai being a 'fucking terror' was hardly a riddle at all. "What did she do this time?"  
"She's at Styx' and Mae's. Pointed a gun at my face and told me to drive her there, after we got your unconscious ass into bed. She wants to settle the score with Prez for kicking your ass last night. Fucking _terror_. Almost took the fucking Beretta with her, too."  
I must've taken too many painkillers. I could've sworn he'd said Sarai had gone to confront Styx, at his own house, with a gun, on my behalf. Like some sort of crazy chick with a death wish.  
"You want to drive yourself, or do you- whoa."  
I weaved and slumped, momentarily dizzy and breathless.  
"Come on, I'll drive you there." Ash mumbled curses under his breath and went outside. I followed him, focusing on the visage of Hades with the noose on his cut as my vision tunneled.  
The way was at least four times longer than normal, and only kept from barking at Ash to drive faster than my dead grandma because my mouth was full with army ration-style granola bars from Ash's glove box and water to wash them down.  
I wanted to throw up yet again when we pulled into the gravel parking lot and Mae and Bella were loitering around outside, looking tense. Fuck. Fuck. That wasn't good.  
"Where is she?" I called before I had even made it out of the truck. Now there was a question that was becoming my catchphrase.  
"Good heavens, Vike! What—" Mae looked me up and down, her gaze getting stuck on the expansive, ugly blotches of inky blue, purple and dark green that covered my left chest down to my navel and went all around to the side, then on the bandage on my fingers, and on each bruise, nick and cut that was visible up and down my arms and on my face. Styx, Ky and Rider hadn't held back – to be fair, neither had I.  
"Inside, with Rider," Bella answered. She was pissed. It was her default setting when it came to me. Absolutely stunning face and a smokin' body, terrible bad taste in men. Fucking shrew of a woman, that one. No idea how she could be related to Madds.  
Her answer filtered through to me just as an eerie sound emanated from the cabin, and it actually took a second to identify it as human.  
Human, shattering, to be exact.  
 _You forgot to kill me. I just wanted my mom. Just wanted to go home. No one ever came to save me._  
Those felt like punches to the already bruised gut.  
Even when she first broke down in Clearwood, I had known that there would be encores and sequels down the road. The heap of shit that was her life was just too large to jump over with just one leap, and new pitfalls would always open up when her memory would shift and be triggered by something or another.  
But this one – I had fucked this up. Bringing her here and not taking care of her enough and letting her confront people alone, that had been too much at once, and I should have know. I should have seen it coming.  
This would end right here. Right here.  
I went inside and saw her standing stiffly in the arms of that asshole, wailing and tears streaming down her face.  
Should've aimed for his face more last night, and hit harder. I shoved the dickhead out of the way and turned my old lady around toward me.  
At my first touch, she clutched at me like a drowning woman, slinging her arms and legs around my neck and my waist, and I enveloped her. Even if it was real hard right now to keep myself from falling apart when her frantic cries actually hurt my fucking soul enough to make tears burn in my own eyes, I'd hold her together.  
I would. She'd see.  
As I passed them with Sarai clinging to me like a monkey, I looked over to Mae and Bella. For once, both of them wore matching expressions of shock and concern. Picking up on the sheer misery, Makaria started bawling along with Sarai. Mae pulled her closer to her chest.  
"It's alright," I told Sarai, murmuring into her hair, doubting that she could hear me at all. Years of misery and bone-deep remorse kept flowing out of her in the form of "I am sorry. I am so sorry." "They hear you," I told her.  
I somehow eased myself and my cargo into the passenger seat of the truck and Ash drove off, keeping the side-glances to a minimum and all comments to himself. Good kid. I'd buy him a fucking beer soon.  
I carried Sarai into my cabin, closed the door behind me with my foot, and sat down on the couch so she rested in my lap, her legs to either side of me. Thankfully, my couch was a well-worn piece of shit with considerable give, so I could angle my mangled thigh out of the way and arrange her sweet little butt more on my other leg.  
Her cries of "I'm sorry" had subsided, but she was still sobbing every now and then, and trembling like a leaf. I hated it but knew that she'd just have to get through this part. I kept running my hand up and down her back to try and soothe her. Eventually, she fell silent and sagged against me.  
Her hair tickled my upper arm. I became aware of how her heartbeat knocked against my naked chest, and of her warm breath stroking over the skin at the crook of my neck.  
"You still here, then?" she whispered. Cried herself hoarse, the crazy woman.  
I couldn't help the small smile. "Told you the first time, a few tears ain't gonna scare me away." I kept my voice low to match hers and to not break the moment.  
Undoing my efforts of preserving this strangely comfortable mood, she suddenly sat up and looked at me in panic, scanning my face, touching my bruises and the stitched cut over my eyebrow with fluttery little fingers. "Oh God, oh God. Viking. You were badly hurt. I thought you would not—I—" She gasped and looked down at me, in all my bare-chested glory, my skin looking like an actual map of the stars, and at herself, how she was perched on my legs, then canted her hips to take her weight off my left thigh, which almost caused her to tumble down from the sofa. "I was not able to redo the stitches there because I did not have enough thread and-"  
"Sarai," I interrupted her and grabbed her hips, left and right, so she couldn't dismount. I rather liked her exactly where she was.  
I had always liked to have a bitch on my lap, but this one was especially nice.  
Suddenly, she was nose to nose with me, and the both of us stopped and stared.  
Breathed each other in and out.  
Her eyes were red-rimmed and glossy, her eyelashes stuck together, and the tip of her nose was pink. She had this reborn, freshly peeled look that some women got after crying themselves out, like tears were dewdrops and this was the dawn of a brand new day.  
Man, I wanted to own that day and put my dirty fingerprints all over it.  
"I'm about to kiss you," I told her quietly.  
I heard her swallow hard. Saw her suck her lower lip into her mouth to wet it. She never broke eye contact.  
To be honest, I was a little worried because I hadn't kissed a female on the mouth in more than thirty years. Plenty had stuck their fat lips on mine and their tongue down my throat and I had never minded that much, but I had never felt the need to initiate a kiss. Not a pre-sex mauling, not wild tonsil tennis to get one another revved up, not a warm-up for the tongue before going down under, but an actual kiss.  
I felt that need now. It was much like hunger for air, just more pleasant and more urgent at the same time.  
I tilted my chin up and touched my mouth to hers.  
She inhaled sharply and exhaled softly. Her fingers curled against the skin of my neck, where my hairs were standing on end like I'd been zapped.  
When she moved her mouth against mine, it felt like it was the moon and the water in my blood was responding.  
My arms wrapped themselves around her on their own accord, to pull her closer.  
My fingers drove into her hair to tilt her head more toward me, closer.  
My lips opened to invite her in, so she could come as close as possible.  
She was hesitant and not very skillful in accepting that invitation, but I loved that she did. I loved that she trembled and tried, failed, and tried again when our teeth and noses got in the way. I held her, my hands roaming up and down her back and cupping her ass, and let her figure out what she liked.  
Turned out she liked to kiss with her eyes closed and her mouth open, and to poke and rub the tip of my tongue with hers while grinding her middle into the bulge in my jeans in the same rhythm. She was almost subtle about it at first, made it seem like accidental contact, sneaky little she-devil, but I was on to her. With a pleased smile that she must have felt against her own mouth, I grabbed the globes of her ass and helped her help herself. The friction I was getting through the solid denim wasn't going to be enough for me, but it didn't matter. This one was hers alone.  
We kept kissing – more and more sloppily, and I fucking loved that, too, her lips looked fucking fantastic all wet and puffy – and she twitched her hips back and forth with little breathy gasps that I wanted to hear every single day from now on until I died.  
She breathed my name – _Ulfr_ – into my mouth and shut her eyes tightly, tucked her face into the crook of my neck again and let it happen. My ribs hurt a bit whenever she jostled them as she writhed against me, but I couldn't have given less of a fuck.  
"I wanna see your face when you come," I told her, and she whimpered and nipped my skin with her teeth – _fuck, yes_ – and rolled and jerked her pelvis forward and back, forward and back, then forward hard enough to drive the air out of me. I pulled her head back by her hair and looked my fill at her, seeing her smother the groan with gritted teeth, face all flushed and a little bit of sweat and saliva gleaming on her upper lip, eyes clenched shut, before she fully relaxed as her orgasm lost its grip.  
"Beautiful," I said and felt her shudder, either with delight or with post-orgasmic bliss, or both. I pulled her in for another kiss and couldn't help but slide my hand under the waistband of her pants and feel her skin on my palm. Such a nice ass. Nice to look at, even nicer to touch.  
I stopped.  
Skin to skin.  
No panties.  
I groaned and reached my longest finger down and forward, just to that juncture where the swell of her ass, the inside of her thigh and the outer crease of her pussy met.  
Sarai sat up straight with a whoosh of an inhalation that spelled my name when I dipped my fingertip into the wetness coating her skin there. Soaked halfway down her thigh.  
"I fucking love this," I told her. She whimpered something incoherent and leaned her forehead against my shoulder, and tilted her hip to give me even better access. I practically purred and played with her cream on her soft skin, rubbing it in and rubbing it between my fingers. So slick. "I'm never gonna go thirsty," I couldn't help but joke, "and if I drown when you sit on my face, that'll be the best fucking way to go."  
"Viking, please," she said against my skin.  
"That's what you're gonna say over and over while you drown me," I agreed, and laughed at her attempt to hide her face even more. "Death by sexy waterboarding."  
"Viking, no."  
"Viking, yes!" I countered, imitating her squeaky, embarrassed voice which was so fucking adorable I couldn't help the grin. "And I'm never gonna need to buy lube," I murmured into her ear, grinning some more. "No matter which hole I wanna play with, I can just tap into this endless supply-"  
"Vike!" she hushed and brought one of her hands against my mouth to stop me from talking.  
I sucked her fingers into my mouth to the second knuckles and flicked my tongue against them until she pulled them back again – reluctantly, I thought.  
For a good, long while, we just sat there like that.  
I thought she might've fallen asleep when I heard another, "I am sorry", barely audible.  
I gently squeezed her to me. I wanted to tell her that I thought she'd suffered more than enough, and that I was in this for the absolute long haul but also wouldn't allow her to let herself be eaten up by her guilt, and that I wanted to go and wring Bella's and Rider's necks – because I had no fucking doubt that they had started this fire with whatever they had said to her – and that I was not the one she would ever have to say these words to.  
I settled on "I am here, sugarbun", and held on to her as we both fell asleep, right there, sitting on my couch.

/

 **TBC**


	20. Chapter 19

_**Sarai**_

The next few days were the happiest of my life, so far as I could remember it.  
I could not even say exactly how many there were, because we ate and slept so irregularly. There was no rhythm to it. There was no calendar and sometimes I looked at the one clock in Viking's cabin and could not say if it was seven in the morning or in the afternoon.  
I loved it. It felt like we were not living on Earth but on a different planet, separate from anyone and anything else, all alone together.  
I loved the kissing and touching. Whenever Viking told me that he wanted to kiss me, my body began to hum. His touches were surprisingly gentle, sometimes frustratingly so. He always wore a very satisfied expression on his face when I leaned in harder or put my hand on top of his to intensify the contact.  
We did not have sex. He said we would have plenty of time for that once his body was healed up and he could "enjoy me properly". Indeed, the bruises on his chest and stomach seemed to turn a deeper, inkier blue for a few days, and he often flinched from pain when he moved this way or that even though he tried to hide it. At least the wound in his thigh and the cut on his forehead were healing up steadily and without complications.  
He still made sure that I _enjoyed_ myself, for the time being.  
His fingers were _so big_. It made me blush every time I cared for his left hand – the one with the two dislocated fingers I had taped with a make-shift splint – and every time he caught sight of the blush, he smugly asked me why my ears were so red. And then he added to the reasons I blushed.  
But there was more to that time than just gentle bodily delights. We played games – not Scrabble, though ("'Contumelious' is not a fuckin' word!") – and listened to music and simply talked. Viking had so many entertaining stories to tell. Every nook and cranny, every room and item in the cabin, every song he played on a large device he called a 'stereo' seemed to be connected to some person or event, featuring on an endless tapestry of memories. The stories were small or large and sprawling, funny or sometimes sad; some had a point when most they were just a single paragraph out of a much larger story.  
I listened and tried to see where I might fit into them, only to find that I did not. Still, I asked to hear them. Viking was trying so hard for me. He had thrown down the gauntlet to his brothers and let himself be gravely injured for me. Now he was spending time away from his club, just for me, costing him precious moments as well as financial opportunities.  
He had done so much to get me to this point. The least I could do for him was to care for his injuries, and to hold on to the slim hope that his efforts were not in vain – that somehow, somewhen, I would find my niche next to him.  
Unlike me, he clearly had no doubts about it. He talked about the future often. About how we would meet this or that person, do this or that with the children because it was fun, eat this or that food cooked by someone or another because it was so delicious it made you weep. He spoke about experiences he could hardly wait to share with me.  
"You'll love it," he promised.  
I could only smile and nod and turn my face away in time before the smile turned sour.  
 _The best old lady._ Nothing less would do.  
One day, he lay next to me and I next to him. I now understood why the beds in this cabin were so very large.  
I felt clean and comfortable in a pair of socks and one of Viking's T-shirts. It smelled like washing powder and Viking, and the sleeves fell past my elbows and the seam almost to my knees. The neckline was so wide that it slid off one shoulder.  
He said he liked seeing me in it.  
I liked seeing him in nothing but his underpants. (Or without them, really. I had gotten a peek of him under the shower the day before because he liked to leave the bathroom door open. The mere sound of running water now made me blush, too.)  
I especially enjoyed running the backs of my fingers along his skin. He was really hairy pretty much everywhere, but his hair was not scratchy at all, and it had a beautiful bronze color –not as red-blonde as the hair on his head but one of the shades of red that were found in his beard – that shone against the milky white of his skin.  
"You do not have any tattoos, or piercings," I remarked. I had inspected his whole body several times over (more or less thoroughly; for the time being, he steered me away from his groin in his own interest; quote: "Good Lord, woman, have some mercy on your old man.") and had found color in his skin only in the form of fading bruises and scars.  
"I'm a work of art already," he drawled lazily. "To gild refined gold, paint the lily, perfume the violet… is just fuckin' silly."  
"And so humble, too," I nodded, and he laughed a smoker's laugh.  
"Ash has so many tattoos," I said. "Is he trying to hide something underneath them?"  
Vike lifted his head from the pillow to glance at my face. "You can ask him yourself, you know. What all his tats mean."  
My pulse spiked at the thought of talking to anyone that was not Vike. If I could choose, I would never want to leave this house. This bed.  
"In any case, I'll tell him to put on a fucking shirt in the future," Vike grumbled. "Can't have my old lady ogling all that young man-flesh and the abs and that V that points to his dick and all that shit."  
I chuckled once. "I do not ogle."  
"Well, ya fuckin' should. Ogle _me_ , that is." He lifted one arm in the air, bent it in a dramatic fashion and laid a smacking kiss on the massive bulge of his own bicep. "Look at these muscles!" With both hands, he patted his hirsute pectorals. "Woven from pure Nordic testosterone." His hands slid downward to his belly – carefully avoiding the bruises yet, which were almost entirely yellow now. "A barrel made of steel! None of that zero-body-fat, veiny-rippling-muscle-washboard-prettyboy crap, but solid goddamn strength." He looked over at me and raised one eyebrow. "What d'you say? Ogle-worthy?"  
I stifled a laugh and felt my cheeks heating. I was quite certain that this counted as vanity, which was a sin. And also, it was embarrassing how close to my own appreciative thoughts of his physique he was. I glanced downwards from his hands and a "Keep going…?" slipped out of my watering mouth.  
"Ohh-ho!" He sat up, propping on his elbows, with a glint was in his eyes. "Now we're gettin' somewhere. Which part of me are we inclined to ogle today, then?"  
I pressed my lips together before I could say something like "your thighs", "your hands", "your backside" or "your forearms", but my eyes went to those places anyway. And to those in between, because they were nice to look at, too.  
Viking just laughed uproariously and put his hands up behind his head, reclining luxuriously. "Good answer. Good fuckin' answer."  
Nestling closer to his side until the tip of my nose touched the skin on his side and my right big toe poked against his calf, I closed my eyes. He was always warm, like a heating pad. My body fat was still not all the way up, so I treasured any warmth I could get.  
"Seriously, though. There's a little get-together tomorrow evening, place near the compound. Not a big thing, maybe fifteen people, couple old ladies, no sluts, bit of booze, pool, cards, music, we'll grill up some burgers and stuff. Ash'll be there, too. With his damn shirt on. You can ask him about the tats."  
Dread sprouted inside my stomach like moss coating me from the inside. "Okay," I said because I knew that was what I was supposed to say.  
"Okay," he replied and reached out to curl a hand around my shoulder.  
He fell asleep. I did not, for a very long time.  
The next day – or at least I believed it was the next day; it was after another long nap – a guest (a "prospect", whatever that meant) left another box at the door. In the box were some cans and packets of food, bushels of vegetables such as carrots, two boxes of milk, a six-pack of beer, and two smaller, rectangular cardboard boxes. Viking handed the boxes-within-the-box over to me and told me to go open them. "The small one first. Put them on".  
So I went into the bedroom, opened the first box by slicing the sticky tape with my fingernail, and put on the underwear I found inside, sealed in clear plastic shrink-wrap. It was flesh-colored, made from a silky, stretchy and comfortable material. The bra was just a little too loose because my breasts did not fill out the cups.  
Viking came into the bedroom and saw me standing there, in front of his slim mirror. He went down on his knees before me, pulled the panties down to my ankles, and kissed that which he had uncovered. Thoroughly. For a precious few minutes, he jarred loose the knotted thoughts in my head. I wished nothing more than for him to lay me down on the bed and sleep until everything was over.  
As always, my wish was not granted.  
In the bigger box, I found a dress. It was a dark navy-blue and a comfortably loose fit, held together with a slim brown belt at my waist, falling almost all the way to my ankles. I had to admit, it made me look nice. Or at least I thought so when I stepped out of the bedroom and Viking stopped, stared and gave me a hungry-eyed once-over.  
He had put on dark jeans and a grey shirt that clung to his torso, as well as the leather vest he referred to as a "cut". He had explained its components to me, the meaning of the different patches and motives on it. I was just glad I had not cut it off of him that day, like I had his jeans and shirt, to get to his wounds. It was sacred to him.  
"You're gonna need proper shoes at some point, but for now, the ones Ash gave you will do."  
I nodded evenly, but my heart sped up. "For now," he had said. "For now" meant there would be more of these outings in the future after this one. They would multiply.  
Before my eye, I saw them coming at me like a pack of wolves. I stood frozen to the spot, the ghost of Viking's warmth next to me but not him.  
One of the wolves had Mae's blue eyes.  
 _The best old lady.  
Stay out of their sight.  
Learn the rules.  
No do-over.  
Eternal probation.  
Don't screw up.  
It will be on Viking.  
It will be on Viking.  
_As if in a trance I held my hand out to him. Closed in my fist was a slender dog leash made of black leather, and a collar made of softer, green leather. Both had dangled on the coat hooks that were screwed to the back door. My trembling made the brass trigger hook at the end jingle like a little bell.  
Viking looked up at me from where he was tying his boots.  
"You said you would keep me on a tight leash," I told him, recalling the words I had heard him say to his brothers the evening he had come back to me.  
Vike paused, then laughed. "Yeah, pretty sure Trooper is going to be pissed about it. First of all, it's his leash and collar. And he might be a bit offended. I mean, does that still count as cosplay, or is it already cultural appropriation? Either way, he'd try to hump you. Wouldn't mean anything, though. Tries to hump everything now and then."  
"Please?" I asked.  
He had gotten up from the chair and was rummaging around the kitchen counter. "Let's see. You can do 'heel' and 'stay' already, yeah?"  
"Yes," I answered. "I—I would stay by your side at all times."  
"I expected nothing less," I said and then winked at me. "If you ask nicely, maybe I'll let you go to the toilet for a wee-wee. Or to a tree, whatever." He chuckled.  
Of course I would ask. I would ask him about everything. "Will you invite me to speak?"  
"Oh, don't worry. I'll let you know every single time you can open your pretty mouth, sugarbun!" he replied. "We'll be there for a couple of hours, maybe. 120 seconds of total air-time will be enough for you, don't you think?"  
Two minutes. That seemed like a lot. "Yes," I agreed.  
"Alright. Fantastic discussion. Put this on." He held out one of his thick leather jackets to me. The material creaked under its own weight. "You'll learn how to ride bitch today. You ever seen the real Texas?"  
I still stood there with the leash and the collar.  
We looked at each other.  
"Please," I repeated.  
Offered both items again.  
Watched how his face fell.  
My heart fell with it.  
"You're serious," he said, eyes narrowed and focusing on my face. He took half a step back from me and let the jacket sink halfway to the floor. "You're actually for real right now. You want me to put a leash on you?"  
He said it like it was unthinkable. But had he not suggested it in the first place?  
 _The best old lady._  
I nodded. "I would stay by your side."  
"And you would actually ask me if you could go take a whiz." There was something like disgust in his voice. I did not understand it.  
"I—If you do not want me to ask, I can refrain from doing so," I offered.  
"And then? You won't go to the toilet at all?"  
I frowned. I was getting confused. "Unless you… I mean. I would stay by your side for the duration of the event. If you do not want me to ask you if I could visit the restrooms, I will not-"  
"Fuck! Sarai!" He looked at me with large, angrily confused eyes. "Where the fuck is this coming from?! We're fucking going to a little party! To have fun and hang out with some people! Fuck knows you didn't get out _nearly_ enough your entire life! And now you're talking about, what, you going there like you're a humanoid dog, and asking me if you can go take a leak? What?!"  
I had made a mistake. I had misunderstood everything.  
Taking all my courage, I asked him directly. "What are the rules?" I needed to know them, lest I broke them. There would be no second chances.  
Viking opened his hands and lifted his shoulders. "What fucking rules, Sarai? What are you talking about?"  
Was this a test? Was that the reason he did not want me to ask directly about it?  
"Mae—Mae said…" I broke off.  
Or maybe they were already so ingrained in him that he felt they were self-evident? Perhaps he might see them in contrast?  
"At the commune, in a mixed social setting, the females were not to make eye contact with any man unless expressedly told to do so. We were to avoid body contact unless it was initiated by the men. We would speak when spoken to. We would not raise our voice, keep our answers concise and always be polite and appropriate in our addresses. Failure to comply would result in corporeal, verbal and mental chastisement."  
Viking just stared at me with an unreadable intermixture of emotions on his face.  
"Judah would often require me to keep hold of his belt at all times. He did not want me out of his arms' reach. I was not to speak to anyone unless he would give me leave to do so. I was not to move at all unless he directed me. If I displeased him, he would tell me what I did wrong, and use ginger root to encourage me to do better next time."  
With a choked sort of sound, Viking threw the jacket over the backrest of one of the kitchen chairs. It was too heavy and slipped down to the floor. He did not pick it up.  
"What are the rules?" I asked again, fixing my eyes on the heap of black leather. "What are the rules of this club? Of being a good old lady?"  
"There fucking aren't any!" he yelled. "You know why? Because this fucking club is nothing like your _fucking_ brainwashing cult!"  
This could not be. How did they all live together without rules? What kept the men from taking advantage of all the women? What kept them from stealing each other's women and property? Viking's cabin did not even have a lock on the doors. And what had Mae meant? She _had_ told me to _learn the rules_. How could I prove myself if there were no rules?  
"Then… Then _you_ give me rules, please," I heard my own voice say. It sounded much more sure and steady than I felt. "What are the boundaries at this social event? What will be the punishment, should I overstep?"  
"What. Fucking. Rules?! What punishment?!" Viking was exasperated. "You want me to dictate when to go to the toilet, and with who you can talk, and for how long?!"  
"Yes," I said. I needed to know, _what_ I could talk about. Was I expected to talk to everyone? For how long? Which topics were considered appropriate, which were not?  
"No!"  
Vike's loud outburst took me so much by surprise I stumbled backwards a step.  
"Why?" I asked, desperate. What was I supposed to do?  
"'Cause I'm not one of the assholes of the commune!" he yelled at me, and his tone of voice and the desperation in it hit me right in the heart. "I'm not your beloved fuckin' _Judah_ , or teacher, or _instructor,_ or whatever the fuck you're into! I'm your Old Man, not some overly controlling father figure!"  
My beloved Judah. That sounded wrong, like two plus two equals three.  
 _Judah is not beloved to me anymore._  
The realization made me a little dizzy. Viking did not give me the time to digest it.  
"Sarai, I know exactly four things in life: drinking, driving, fighting, and fucking. What the fuck do I know about rules?!" He paused to let the echo sink in. "I'm an outlaw, for shit's sake, and I grew up with mostly absentee parents and a psychotic sadist for a sister. I literally don't know the first thing about boundaries. And if you're asking me, I'd say you've had enough boundaries, discipline and rules to last you a fucking lifetime. In fact, most all of the misery of your life so far was due to some dickhead or another giving you rules and putting you in a cage, and having you hold on to their belts and not look other people in the eye, fuckin' hell. I will _not_ join their ranks, sugarbun, I fucking _refuse_ to be one of them. I want you _free_."  
I searched for words to say, to explain it to him better than I had and make him understand, but he did not wait long enough for me to find them.  
"I will _not_ put a goddamn leash on you, Sarai." He came up to me and ripped the leather straps out of my hands, then threw them on the floor. "You wanna be kinky in bed? Yes, please, and thank you. I'd fuck you even if you dressed up like a chipmunk. But outside of the bedroom, I want—I _need_ you on two legs with your chin up, makin' your own rules, like a real person. Fuck!" He wiped his face with his hand and mumbled, "I can't take this. I'm outta here."  
He turned away, grabbed the keys for his motorcycle off the counter top and left the cabin, slamming the door behind him. Seconds later, the engine of his bike started up and quickly faded away.  
I was alone.  
I hugged my elbows to me and shivered.  
No second chances.  
A hole opened up inside my own head and swallowed the confused pain I felt until I was all numb.

/

 **TBC**


	21. Chapter 20

_**Sarai**_

I tried to distract myself from his absence with housework, but it was like trying to go through the same routine while missing one arm. I still got a lot done, and that pleased me. Viking's cabin was small, so the effects of even minimal cleaning and tidying were immediately visible.  
I did not pick up the leather jacket, however. I felt like I needed it to stay where it was, like a testament to what had happened. _  
_I was just getting busy cleaning the windows when I saw movement through the soap-covered pane. I thought it might be an animal – a bird, maybe, or even Ash's dog – but then a boy stepped out of the tree's shades, looking right at me.  
Jake.  
Something shivered in my chest. Something about him was so unsettling.  
I pulled back from the window and into the hallway, to catch my breath out of his sight.  
Neither the front nor the back door of the cabin had a lock. Before long, Jake would certainly come in. I preferred to meet him outside, in the open.  
"What are you doing here?" I asked him, loathe to leave the shelter of the doorway.  
He was wearing a black T-shirt, trousers with a camouflage pattern and black jump boots today.  
Only a gun short of looking like a perfect child soldier.  
"You said you'd help me," he stated and dug a phone out of one of the many pockets of his pants. He held it out to me. "Then do it."  
I did not reach for the phone. "What is it that you mean to do?" I asked. My eyes kept flitting around and my ears pricked for any noise that could be an incoming motorcycle or a truck. I had no way to extract myself from this situation without someone else's support. Mae's words echoed in my head again. _Stay away from the children. Polite to a fault._  
"Call CPS or the police. They'll come to investigate. Griff, Harp and I are gonna go home."  
CPS. The Child Protective Services. My mother had once told me about them. They were a special type of army, she had said, soldiers that came and disrupted earlier communes. Only now, a decade later, did I understand why.  
Three easy steps. Jake had this already figured out.  
"Why do _I_ need to make the call?" I asked.  
That, apparently, was the wrong question. Jake scoffed and rolled his eyes. "You're a _grown-up_ , and a _woman_ ," he said as if the answer was glaringly obvious, and also as if being a grown-up woman was the most ignominious thing he could imagine. "If you call, they'll believe you."  
My eyebrows went up. "You mean, they will not believe you? Because you are… young and male?" I was so confused.  
"Yeah," he snarled. I hear feel his disdain for me and my dumb questions in his tone.  
He offered the phone more insistently. "Come on, take it. Do it. I don't have all day."  
I took the device with ice-cold hands lest he throw it at my face. It was heavier than expected. Upon touching the screen, it came to life, and a photo of Delilah, surrounded by her children, looked at me. Everyone in the picture was smiling, even Jake.  
"Whose phone is this?" I asked.  
Jake shrugged. "Ky's. Why?"  
My stomach plummeted.  
"It doesn't matter. He'll think he lost it. Come on," he urged again. "9-1-1 for the cops, 1-800-2-5-2-5-400 for the CPS. Give it to me, I'll dial it for you-"  
His hand went out to grab the phone again, but I pulled it out of his reach.  
"No, I can do it," I told him and turned away from him. "Let's go inside. It'll be easier to talk because it's quiet."  
He clucked his tongue but followed me all the way into the kitchen.  
My thoughts were racing. I tried to come up with a plan to extract myself from this situation entirely and somehow send him away, but there was none. None that came without dire consequences, anyway.  
I looked down at the black device in my hands. The last time I had used a phone, it had been a lot smaller, and it had had diamond-shaped rubber buttons with numbers on them, and a small display that showed words and digits in lighter green and darker green. Again I was reminded just how much time I had lost.  
Luckily, the phone in my hand was rather straightforward to use. It said "swipe to unlock", so I did with my index finger. The next screen had an icon that showed a telephone receiver, and I tapped on it. While the lower half transformed into a familiar phone keypad, a long list of numbers and names appeared on the top half of the screen. One name and number in particular was listed several times.  
I glanced at Jake who stood two arm's lengths away from me on the other side of the kitchen table, angling the phone slightly away from him, and punched in a number, then pressed the green button with the receiver and lifted the phone to my ear.  
"Put it on loudspeaker," Jake demanded. I turned away from him, gave him my shoulder and demonstratively put my finger into my free ear.  
"Hello," a voice called out from the other end after only two rings, startling me even though I had been prepared. The phone emitted a short buzz of vibration, too, and I clutched it reflexively so as to not drop it.  
"Good afternoon. My name is Sarai, uh, Sorensen. Am I speaking with Child Protective Services?"

/

 _ **Viking**_

That fucking leash. The idea of my bitch wearing a collar, like a literal bitch, on all fours, with a leash.  
Had some asshole done this to her before? Treated her like a dog? Had her eat out of a bowl and fucked her from behind? It was her fucking Prophet, wasn't it?  
I pulled over on the dirt road and got off my bike before I crashed it into a fucking tree. Kicking at rocks was fucking juvenile and stupid, but man, I needed to kick _something_ right now.  
Even worse questions came to me – who woulda thought there were worse questions? But there it was.  
 _Had she liked it?_  
Fuck this.  
 _Did she really_ need _that shit? Or did she just_ think _she did?  
_ Which of that was worse? _  
_FUCK this.  
I wanted her to be my old lady. By my side, not at my fucking feet, goddamn it. Growing, standing tall, next to me. Instead, her only fucking wish was to hunch her shoulders and hide behind me. Hiding from the MC, from my _family_ , of which I wanted her to be a part.  
Alright, I needed a beer. Now.  
So I got my ass back on my bike and rode, the long way round, towards Flame's and Maddie's place. It was actually shorter to just go on foot through the woods than to take the roads, but I was already on my bike and I needed a couple of minutes to stop foaming at the mouth anyway.  
When I pulled up, AK's Street Rod was parked next to Flame's fiery Chopper, and both brothers were sitting on the porch, drinking beer. That actually made me crack a smile.  
"Lookit you. Couple of rocking chairs and a basket full'a wool for your knitting is all that's missing from this picture," I boomed.  
"Shut your mouth and sit your ass down." AK nodded his chin at the empty chair to his left.  
I did, mostly because the cooler full of Southern Star Bombshell Blonde stood right there, too.  
"How are things in pregnancy-land?" I smirked at AK as I opened the first can.  
He didn't even have the energy for a proper comeback, just flipped me off. I laughed.  
"Here's some bullshit for ya," AK said and paused for effect. " _Morning sickness_. Except they don't tell you that no one ever specified that shit geographically. It's always morning _somewhere_ on Earth. Fucking bullshit." He took a gulp from his own beer. "Also, you ever heard of people getting nauseous from _water_? The _smell_ of water, specifically? I didn't even know that water _had_ a smell. Especially not _bottled_ water." He mimed his head exploding and grimaced a silent scream, then fell back into his chair and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Six more months of this. Shoot me now."  
"Might take longer," Flame commented drily and shrugged a shoulder when AK looked at him like he'd sprouted horns. "Postpartum nausea. Google it."  
AK stared and I thought he was either gonna start to cry or launch outta his chair and rip Flame's tongue out. I just laughed my ass off and sipped my beer.  
"Ash told me about Sarai," Flame said, and my laughter instantly died in my throat.  
"That so?" I asked. Fuckin' Ash.  
Flame nodded.  
And said nothing else.  
God.  
Fucking.  
Dammit.  
"This bitch is going to send me to an early grave," I exploded. "Walks into the Prezes house with my fucking gun to avenge me or something. 'Cause she thought y'all had beaten my ass to death, which you damn near did."  
I lifted the cold beer and very, very gingerly set it against the goose-egg still sprouting on the side of my head. Stung like the dickens, more than a week later. Probably should ask Smiler if this was anything to worry about. Same with the half-stitched groove adorning my thigh that didn't seem to be healing up nearly fast enough.  
Both would have to wait. I had a rant to finish.  
"Who does that? Fucking suicidal, self-deprecating, amazingly ballsy, crazy bitches, that's who! Then she completely melts down on me, almost gives me a goddamn heart attack, cause _fucking_ Rider shows his ugly fucking face which looks just like Prophet Shartnazi's and triggers a whole hell of bad memories."  
I didn't mention the out-of-this-world stuff that had happened between that day and now. Some shit was just private and too hard to explain. None of my brothers would understand exactly why I wasn't in any hurry to get my dick into her. Fuck, even I could hardly understand it, really. Something about the anticipation and taking tiny steps and enjoying the togetherness.  
"And then she gets anxious enough to chew her own fingernails bloody at the prospect of ever interacting with a person of this MC that isn't me 'cause apparently Mae gave her an ultimatum or something, to stick to the 'terms and conditions' or get fucking lynched or whatever. So of course now she's convinced she needs some David bloody Koresh meets Christian fucking Grey type of obsessive-compulsive control freak to dictate every little step of her life to keep her from fucking things up for herself, and me, whenever we walk out the door. Jesus H. fucking Christ. Gimme a goddamn break."  
There. Done. I huffed and chugged my beer and crushed the empty can in one hand.  
My two brothers kept silent for a long time.  
"You love her."  
I swiveled my head around to AK and yelled at him, "Of course I fucking love her! She's my old lady, dammit!"  
This wasn't even about the principle of the thing. Loving Sarai was as easy as breathing. Easier than that, in fact, what with my broken ribs. The particulars were the problem. Loving her _properly_ – fuck me, that was more like rocket science. Drunk rocket science, translated by google into fucking sanskrit.  
Couldn't get the fuckin' fear outta my head that maybe she needed more than I'd ever know how to give her, and that I was doing her wrong by wanting to keep her here.  
"Finally." AK grinned into his beer. " _Fucking_ finally, Vike."  
"Yeah, thanks for _that_ helpful input," I grumbled and crushed the already crumpled can with two hands to make a point. Didn't care that the last drops of beer ran landed on my hands. "Least one of us can see the humor in this situation."  
AK just kept grinning. "Finally someone comes along and gives you a challenge, man."  
I glowered. I didn't want a fucking challenge, I wanted to live a good life with my old lady and my club, to eat and to drink, and be merry by occasionally fucking and occasionally hitting someone in the face, and never fucking die.  
My brother opened his hands explaining, "Look. Killing weak-assed Texas Nazis is easy. Fucking sluts is easy. Making brothers laugh and-or punch you in the face is easy. That's all you've been doing with your life for fucking decades now."  
Oversimplification… but not entirely incorrect. I kept glowering.  
"But this bitch… She's a work in progress, man. She's going to need constant effort. You'll have to be ready to fucking wrestle her every step of the way. And I, for one, am gonna be sittin' here and I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of watching that." He grinned so fucking wide my fist was itching to meet his mouth. "Years and years and _years_ of you talking shit about brothers being pussy-whipped. About fuckin' time it came back and bit you in the ass, Vike."  
"Yeah, well. Enjoy your gloating while you can." I rubbed my face. "I'm… I just don't know. Don't know if this is good for her at all. I don't know if she should be here. With me."  
Both of them were silent at that.  
Shortly thereafter, a car came up the driveway and parked over to the side. Phebe's Volkswagen Polo, with Phebe in the driver's seat, Zane riding shotgun, and Madds and the twins in the back.  
"Aaand of course she's driving," AK muttered and cursed as he got up and walked toward the car. Flame followed to help Zane and Maddie unload the two toddlers napping. I watched as hungry kisses and friendly hugs and backslaps were exchanged and the groups reformed. AK, Phebe and Zane drove off while Flame and Maddie carried Isaiah and Lillian over and into the cabin. Maddie greeted me with a smile and a small touch of her hand to my shoulder as she walked by me.  
It had taken her almost four years to get to the point where she would willingly make skin contact with any guy except Flame.  
Four years. And that had been on good terms, in the most favorable conditions, because everybody, from the hardest-hearted of big, sweaty biker dudes to the last dried-up cynical old lady, fucking loved Madds. How could you not? Bitch was an angel and a saint.  
I put my arm across my eyes and closed them and tried real hard not to sound my barbaric yawp of pure frustration. I didn't want an angel or a saint. I wanted my bitch as she was, exactly _because_ she was the furthest possible thing from angelic or saintly, but I wanted her to feel safe and whole and part of something that, for once, wouldn't prey on her.  
Yet here I was, replaying that scene in my head over and over. That fucking leash. Why did my bitch feel like she needed a dictator in her life?  
Flame eventually came out again and sat back down, handing me another beer. I held on to it without opening it. Couldn't stomach it right now.  
"When I first met Maddie, I didn't fucking know anything."  
I looked over at him with narrowed eyes. "What?"  
Brother didn't turn toward me, didn't explain, just kept going. "Didn't know anything. 'sides killing, pain and bikes, I didn't know any fucking thing. Didn't even _know_ that I didn't know anything. _She_ showed me that."  
"Fuck, Flame." I was speechless – and reasonably certain that Flame was talking about sex. It made me cringe a bit on the inside. Didn't want to think about Flame and Madds fucking. They were both too much like little siblings. Some things, you just didn't want to know anything about.  
But this was Flame, and the brother rarely ever talked. Right now it seemed he had a whole speech prepared, which meant that this was real important to him.  
So I sighed, I kept my mouth shut and listened to whatever he had to get off his chest.  
"She also had many things she needed to learn, back then. Maddie and I both needed to learn. She was very patient, with me and with herself. We talked. She… she talked and I listened. We tried and tried and we somehow made it. "  
He fell silent for a bit. I almost thought he was done oversharing already and I had to figure out the point he was trying to make for myself.  
"We made it, Vike." I only then noticed that he was agitated, but different from how he usually was. Positive agitation. Strange to see it on the brother. "She's fucking mine, Vike, all mine, and our kids are mine, and I'm so fucking... I'm so...  
"Happy?" I prompted. Sounded to me like Flame was describing happiness.  
But the brother shrugged and glared straight ahead. He had never been good with any feeling that wasn't anger.  
"I'm glad you're happy, brother. You're good with her and with your kids. You deserve that shit, man."  
Flame shrugged again. I decided to back off a bit with the emotions talk. No need to overload the brother's brain.  
"You and Sarai are the same," Flame suddenly said, surprising the hell outta me. This wasn't like him at all, all that deep shit. "Just like Maddie and me, back then."  
I searched for words for a moment to be tactful about this. "Well, maybe we're a bit different still."  
Flame shook his head decisively. "Sarai is like I was. She knows nothing except killing and pain, and she's just as fucking impatient as I was. I used to fuck up so often and it made me so fucking angry. Sarai's angry, just like I was. At herself because she keeps thinking she fucks everything up. And then she gets scared because every time she fucked up in the past, bad shit happened."  
 _She knows nothing except killing and pain._  
 _Holy fuck._ I grimaced at the physical blow these words dealt against my chest, and at the gut punch of the realization that followed: _She's just trying to make sense of this new life of hers, and I fucking ran away from her and left her alone._  
"So you've got to be like Maddie," Flame continued to unload, unaware or uncaring that his words had sent me into an actual goddamn crisis. "You need to lead her and be patient and talk, like my Maddie did with me. Because Sarai can't do it, just like I couldn't do it. Because I didn't know how. But you do. You're Vike. You need to try and try again and be patient for both of you."  
"That's," I eventually managed to get outta my mouth, "a whole lotta faith you have in me, brother."  
Flame shrugged and leaned back, and that was that.  
I considered the full can of beer in my hand before setting it down. "You know, I think I gotta go have a talk with someone."  
He watched me get on my bike and drive off.

/

 **TBC**


	22. Chapter 21

_**Sarai**_

There was a short silence on the other end. I hoped she would catch on eventually and just continued on as if she had answered. "Yes, ma'am. I am calling on behalf of a young boy, Jake, and his two siblings, uhm, Griff and-"  
"Griffin," Jake sternly corrected from across the table and demanded again, "Put it on loudspeaker!"  
"Griffin," I amended and nervously gestured to Jake to keep silent, then stuffed my finger back into my ear, "and Harper."  
Jake nodded. There was still silence on the line. I kept going.  
"They have been… abducted by members of, uhm, a motorcycle club near Austin, Texas. The… The Hades Hangmen."  
"Is Jake with you right now?" Delilah asked me, voice low but clear.  
I turned another few degrees away from Jake to keep him from seeing the relief on my face. "Yes, that is correct," I answered.  
"Where are you?"  
"Uhm, they live in a cabin close to a compound where the bikers meet," I replied.  
"Viking's cabin," she clarified.  
I nodded reflexively even though she could not see me. "Yes."  
"Viking is not there with you? Or Ash?"  
"That is correct," I stated again, suppressing the urge to look at Jake again to see whether he was suspicious.  
"Ky and I will come and get him. We can be there in ten, fifteen minutes. Will you be alright?" she asked.  
I thought for a moment, heart beating fast and loudly. "I am not certain."  
Now Delilah paused. "Has he attacked you?" she asked with a heavy, sad voice.  
I thought of the Bible, the one with the torn, crinkled pages and the muddy fingerprints that was still lying somewhere under a bush near the river. I thought of the heavy stick Jake had carried and pointed at me like a sword. "Not at the moment, no," I said.  
Delilah heaved a sigh. Static rushed through the line.  
"I am very worried that he might act imprudently," I said. "He might try to run away on his own. It is not safe."  
I heard Jake scoff.  
"Okay. If you can stall him at the cabin, do it. But if he wants to leave and run into the woods again, let him. Ky and Trooper will find him."  
Delilah, her husband and the dog. Hard to say which of them disliked me more.  
"No, this is not my phone," I rushed to bring up the topic. "Jake has abstracted it and brought it to me because I am not integrated into the motorcycle club as all the other grown-ups are. I may not be able to contact you again."  
"Ky and I will come to you and we will talk, alright?" Delilah said. "I will hang up now. We will see each other shortly."  
"Yes," I replied just before the line went dead. "Sarai. S-A-R-A-I. I am twenty years old," I told no-one. "Sorensen.S-O-R-E-N-S-E-N." No one answered. "Yes, I will hold."  
I managed to keep up the act for another three minutes, describing the situation twice more as I understood it and spelling out my name and information, but Jake got impatient and motioned for me to give him the phone back. I hastily acted as if the imaginary CPS-worker was satisfied with the call and said my goodbyes to her. Angling the phone away from Jake again, I tried to make it look like I was hanging up and deleting the number from the calling log I had seen before I had made the call.  
"What did they say? Are they sending the cops? When?" Jake held out his hand. "Give it back."  
"These things take time," I told him. "It is a special situation. This club is almost like its own country, with its own laws and government. Outside forces cannot just come in."  
"I know," Jake grumbled. "My real dad is the boss of another club, over in Louisiana. A much, much bigger club than this one. He runs the show."  
 _If that is true, why does he not come and get you?_ I asked him in my head but did not voice the question. "I see," I said instead and handed over the phone again, feeling like I was giving away incriminating evidence.  
"If you want to come with me, and Griff and Harp, you totally can," Jake offered, much to my surprise. He fiddled with the snaps on the pockets of his pants. "I mean, you're also still kinda young. CPS can probably take you away."  
I felt myself blush. Comparing myself to Delilah and then Mae, I had felt that I was practically inchoate, an incomplete person. But – a _child_?  
"You'll need protection anyway. Ky and Styx find out you made that call, they kill you."  
I went cold all over with how callously he told me this. The consequences had been obvious to him from the beginning, and yet he had pressured me into making this phone call. I would have been the pawn sacrifice in his scheme.  
Maybe I still was. I would have to wait for Delilah's – and Ky's, and Mae's – verdict.  
Suddenly I was even more unsure whether I had figuratively and literally made the right call than I had been just before, with that picture of a smiling family and Mae's warning and Jake's simmering aggression and Viking's face – for whatever reason – in mind.  
"Thank you for the warning," I replied with a hollow voice.  
Jake shrugged. It seemed to be his preferred mode of communication.  
"Do you… Do you want something to eat?" I asked him.  
Truly, I did not want to stall him. His presence made me anxious. His eyes were too keen and too dark for comfort. The bulging pockets of his pants were like a silent threat. All manner of weapons could fit into them.  
"You got beer?" he asked and went to open the refrigerator without waiting for my reply. As it happened, Viking had put the latest six-packs on top of the pantry and not into the refrigerator. I was relieved that he did not inspect the pantry for I knew that, in addition to the beer, a bottle of Jim Beam was sitting in the back of its top shelf.  
Jake was only eight years old. Was it normal for eight-year-olds to drink alcohol and to think about war and sex and murder? Were there really no rules at all in Viking's world?  
"What happened to your mother, Jake?"  
The question stopped him in his tracks for a second. He threw the refrigerator door shut so hard the bottles and cans inside rattled. "None 'o your fuckin' business," he shot back, and left.  
He left. Just like that.  
I followed his path with my eyes through one of the side windows. He went into the forest and vanished.  
Trepidation writhed in my stomach as I waited by the front window for Delilah's and Ky's arrival. Several minutes later, they pulled up in a silver pickup truck. The dog, Trooper, jumped off the truck bed as soon as the vehicle came to a stop.  
"He went into the forest, that way," I told them as I went outside to meet them and pointed to where Jake had vanished. "Only five or six minutes ago."  
"Did he have a backpack with him or something?" Ky asked, not unkindly but not patiently, either.  
I shook my head. "Not that I have seen. He was wearing those soldier's pants, though, and his pockets seemed very, uhm, full."  
Ky muttered something about boy scouts under his breath and hollered for Trooper who had gone to sniff around the area but quickly came to Ky's side. "I'll go get him," he told his wife, grabbed her and kissed her hard on the mouth, clipped a long leash onto the dog's collar – I averted my eyes – and also walked into the woods.  
Delilah watched him leave, then sighed deeply. "My wayward son." Then, her bright blue eyes fixed on me. Like I had known they would. "Why did Jake come to you, Sarai?"

/

Why _did_ Jake come to me?  
I could repeat the statement I had made in the phone call – that I was not really a part of the MC that he was trying to escape from and thus his perfect, and only, confidante.  
But that was not the question, I knew. Delilah was wondering how Jake knew me at all.  
I tried to come up with an evasive story about how he must have overheard someone talk about a new old lady at Viking's cabin, and then taken his chances persuading her to make that phone call on his behalf. Before I said one word, however, Delilah spoke again.  
"You really met him that day, did you not? By the river, when you told me he was on the other side?" As if feeling my reluctance, she added, "It is okay. I am not angry, and I shall not tell Ky about it, either. I have not told him that it was you I met in the forest, anyway, and I will continue to keep my silence about it."  
I bit my lip, suddenly embarrassed. "He scared me," I said, and huffed humorlessly. "An eight year old boy scares me."  
"That is also okay. He scares me too, sometimes," Delilah admitted with a sigh. "There is much anger in him, and someday it will break through." She looked at me with a small, tired smile. "I would like some cool lemonade, if you have any to spare."  
We went inside and I poured her a glass of sweetened orange juice. She sipped and gave a sigh of pleasure.  
"Why is he like… like that?" I asked when I could not contain my curiosity any more. It felt like I needed all the information on Jake I could get, for the next time he came to me, to defend myself against him somehow.  
"I think it is simply his nature," Delilah replied after a short consideration. "But his father may have made it worse."  
Her words reminded me of what Viking had said about parents and their power over children.  
"Did he grow up in a commune?" It seemed natural to ask. The longer I thought about it, the more familiar Jake seemed to me – until I realized that, in just a few more years, he would be exactly like Brother Moses. The same calculating eyes. A propensity to add overt violence to the sharings. Fascination for sex to an ungodly degree. I suddenly remembered how my mother had once warned me away from him. I must have been four or five years of age. Moses had thankfully lost interest in me shortly thereafter.  
Delilah shook her head. "No. He grew up in a motorcycle club in Louisiana." She scanned my face. "I can tell you the whole story, if you promise not to hold it against him."  
I frowned, unsure what that meant, but nodded.  
Delilah took another sip of lemonade before she started to talk.  
"Jake's, Harper's and Griffin's biological mother's name was Sarah. She was known as Minnie to the Louisiana chapter of the Hades Hangmen, though. She was what bikers call a 'club slut'. Since she was very beautiful, she caught the eye of a biker at the bar in Shreveport. He laid claim to her for a few years. His name was Spook, and he became the sergeant-at-arms of the Hangmen there."  
I nodded as if I understood although I did not, not fully.  
"Spook was important and feared within the club. No one dared protest his behavior for a long time. He had many women, most of whom he treated quite poorly, he had many altercations over women with other men, and he fathered many children," Delilah explained. "Within two years, he got Minnie with child. Jake. The pregnancy was not easy, however. When she told Spook that her doctor had informed her that her son might be born with a genetic disorder called Down Syndrome, he insisted she get rid of him. Have an abortion, seven months into the pregnancy. She refused and escaped to her parents in Oklahoma for a while where, eventually, she gave birth to Jake, who turned out a healthy boy."  
I tried to imagine a man who might see his woman so heavily pregnant and insist upon killing the child that was already visibly moving inside of her. What kind of man would do something so cruel?  
"Sarah and her parents did not get along well, so after a while she decided to return to Louisiana. She got her old job in Shreveport back and before long, Spook knew that she was back in town, with a 'normal' boy that looked like him and was the right age. He found her and presented her with a choice: She could come live at the MC permanently so that he might raise his son – and take care of her, financially – or he would just take Jake from her. Of course she went with him. So Jake lived mostly with his father from when he was 2 years old."  
I pressed my lips together. This seemed unfair although I could not put my protestation into words. As the father, the child naturally belonged to him if he wanted to claim it. Or was that something I had read in the false Bible? Or in the real Bible? I rubbed at my forehead.  
"While at the compound, Sarah – Minnie – came in contact with many MC men. One of them was Byrd. They fell in love, but had to keep it a secret because Spook had still claimed Minnie and was basically holding Jake's life in his hands."  
"So… Harper and Griffin…" I interjected, already anticipating the next step.  
"Yes. Harper and Griffin are most likely Byrd's children. Harper looks like her mother, but Griffin is clearly not Spook's child. Sarah and Byrd must have seen it earlier than Spook. The two arranged for Sarah and the kids to move away from the compound and to an apartment in Shreveport during an MC war against the cartels. They convinced Spook that this was to prevent the children from getting hurt by the Mexicans in case of an attack. Mostly, however, it was done to hide Griffin and Harper from Spook himself."  
Delilah seemed angry and sad at the same time.  
"Spook has a horrendous history with what he would call 'mailman's children' – children fathered by some other man to women he considered 'his'. So Sarah basically locked Harper and Griffin up in that secret apartment to hide them from the world and from Spook, and made Jake their protector. But she never spoke to Jake about his father. About his true colors. She never told him that he was a violent man, or that he, Jake, would not even have been alive if his father had gotten his way. Jake still thinks Spook a hero. He remembers him from his early childhood. He remembers how Spook doted on him and paraded him in front of the MC brothers like a little prince. They spent a lot of time together. Spook definitely molded Jake's character. Jake never really forgave his mother for taking his father away from him, or vice versa. I believe that she either thought Jake might not believe her and get angry and turn from her, or that she did not want to defile her son's happy childhood memories."  
I was about to ask why Sarah could not tell her about her intentions personally when she spoke up again.  
"One day, almost two years ago, Sarah got killed on the street by a drunk driver. Byrd died the very same day in a motorcycle accident of his own."  
She caught her breath as if the mere telling of a story exhausted her, or maybe she was personally affected by the passing of Sarah and Byrd. I wondered if she had known either of them.  
"By then, a man named Crow had become the new president of the MC, and he knew all about Sarah, Spook, Byrd, the three children and their whole story. Byrd had confided in him. Crow knew that Spook must not get his hands on Harper and Griffin in particular. Thus, Crow got word to a friend in Texas and arranged for the children to leave the state and Spook's sphere of influence after Sarah's passing. That friend is a friend and brother of Ky's, and he knew that Ky and I would be willing to adopt children – and protect them within the MC. That's how we got Jake, Harper and Griffin. Another friend who is very computer-wise changed a few names and certificates in the databases, paid a lot of money, and now we are officially their parents."  
There was a small smile on her lips as she said it.  
So that was why Jake kept trying to leave this place, and why he alleged that he had been abducted. I frowned to myself. I had believed him.  
"Griffin and Harper are both wonderful. So cheerful in disposition and sweet-natured, even though Harper will grow up to be tougher than nails while Griffin is all softness and charm. They both took to their new lives easily." Delilah's smile morphed into a wistful expression.  
"But Jake has a hard time. Not only does he not understand why he cannot be with his father, but he is also superfluous as a protector of his siblings. The war as he knew it is over. Harper and Griffin are thriving without his supervision now. He must feel lost, and I fear I do not know how to help him. I fear he is simply not compatible with us, and we not with him."  
She sighed and wiped underneath her eye with the knuckle of her index finger.  
"The worst part is that I do not know whether we are actually doing him wrong," Delilah said, surprising me. She shrugged her slim shoulders. For once, there was no trace of the self-assured woman I had imagined her to be. "Who is to say that he would not be happy at Spook's side? From everything Crow has told us, Spook _was_ a good father to Jake at least, even if he was a terrible man to Sarah. Not gentle or loving, not conventionally fatherly, but caring in his own way. Who is to say that Jake does not need that type of attachment figure to thrive? Some children simply need... strictness and hard rules to feel adequately loved. I fear that Jake simply needs the type of attention, devotion and intensity to thrive that Spook gave him, which Ky and I do not have that in us. Not just because we have five - soon six - other children to consider, but also because it is not in our nature."  
My cheeks grew warm even as my heart grew heavy. I understood Jake. I understood him all too well. I, too, longed for that which she was talking about, for hard hands and rules.  
My Spook's name was Judah. He had treated me badly, I understood now, while also treating me right. Just like Jake, I had no way of going back to 'Spook', but his imprint was indelible, and empty. Achingly empty, and it made me angry and sad.  
I averted my eyes and let my hair fall forward over my face to hide the blush in my cheeks and the redness of my ears. This story was not about me at all and she did not mean me, but I felt the resonance all the same. I _was_ 'some child'. Even Jake had mentioned that I was child-like enough to be taken by the CPS.  
Delilah did not notice my embarrassment. She was lost in her own narration.  
"Spook has certainly not been a good man, but perhaps his son would have a good influence on him in return? He has done horrible things, and there is no atonement for that, but I also believe that he does not really understand his own wrongdoing yet. Maybe being with Jake would open his eyes to it. After all, Jake truly loves his brother and sister. He could teach his father compassion." She reaffirmed her grip around her glass of lemonade and heaved another sigh. "Hence I fear I am doing them both wrong by holding on so tightly, in addition to myself and Ky. Ky and I are both heartsick over Jake. Ky is also trying everything, and every time he fails, he doubts himself and his heart, thereby breaking mine. It is…" She chuckled in a sad sort of way, then whispered, "It is driving me _fucking nuts._ "  
I felt my eyes go wide. Such language from a woman's mouth.  
Delilah caught my eye and chuckled again, more happily this time. "Just goes to show how much of an influence the men in one's life have on you," she said with a roguish smile. There was some pride in it.  
"What are you going to do?" I asked after several seconds of companionable silence.  
"I do not know." She shrugged again, and I thought that maybe this gesture was her influence on Jake. "Ky wants to talk to Jake and tell him everything. I believe this would only make things worse. I do not want to ruin his childhood memories, either. If he even believed me, that is. Jake is so far gone already in his conviction that he and his sister and brother were abducted, that his father is the president of the Hangmen chapter of Louisiana which is subordinated to this mother chapter, I fear it would only feed his narration. You know, the one about the _evil_ Lilah and Ky, who brainwashed his siblings, and the mighty Texas Hangmen MC, who keeps him prisoner, and his father, the thwarted underdog who yearns for his children." She gestured with her hands to illustrate two parties on a stage, set up against one another. "He is the star of his own conspiracy theory." She dropped her hands into her lap and wilted before my eyes.  
"Perhaps you should invite the CPS," I suggested, then berated myself for my haste. She was not asking me for advice, after all. I was speaking out of turn.  
"What do you mean?" she asked, frowning.  
"Well… " I searched for words. "Jake heard me make this phone call to you. I think he truly believed I was calling someone from the CPS to come see him. If he really is caught in his own fantasy about higher powers thwarting him, then their failure to show will reinforce it, no? And if they come by and everything is made official and out in the open, she would see that there is no foul play."  
She thought about it for a second, then nodded unhappily. "You are right. But we cannot have any actual authorities pry into our business, neither the MC's business, nor Ky's and mine. Not only might they find irregularities with the adoption process that was illegally sped up, but it will also bring the other adoption to a halt."  
"The other adoption?"  
Her face broke into a bright smile. "Yes. Ky and I are adopting another child." She held up her index finger. "Almost entirely legally, this time."  
She reached into her pants and pulled out a tiny, pear-shaped purse that looked to be hand-made, with a delicate silver catch on top. From the tinkling sound it made, there seemed to be some coins inside as well as the small photograph which she pulled out and slid across the table to show me.  
"His name is Zachary. He is just over a year old."  
From the photo, a small baby with light brown skin, curly black hair and huge brown eyes looked at me. He had exactly two big, white teeth and smiled from one ear to the other.  
An "oh!" slipped out of my mouth. That was a _very_ pretty face indeed. Those eyes were so very big and liquid, like the stars were shining out of them.  
"Right?!" Delilah exclaimed, grinning and gushing. "He is the _cutest_ baby on this planet. No one can resist his charms. They are even stronger when you meet him in person. I have already completely forgiven him for giving my six the chicken pox. I think I might forgive him pretty much everything."  
Almost reluctantly, I handed the small picture back to her.  
"It is not clear who his mother is. His father was a brother of the Louisiana chapter, just like Spook and Byrd, but he died a few months ago after suffering a heart attack. Zachary has since been in the care of his father's mother, grandma Moira. She is…" Delilah tilted her head and exhaled noisily. "A handful. Not fond of the MC, or people in general. Sadly, for all her steel spine and prickly attitude, the dear old lady has three different types of cancer at once and probably will not live to see her eighty-seventh birthday. She was planning to hand Zachary over to the foster care system… and she will certainly do so if Ky and I are under CPS investigation and the adoption process is stalled in any way."  
I nodded to show that I understood. "A complicated situation."  
"You could really have called the CPS," Delilah suddenly said. "Why did you call me instead?"  
I thought hard for a long moment, but I did not find an adequate answer. It was too convoluted a mixture of gut feelings and selfish interest and fear that had led me to deceiving Jake and dialing her number. I lifted my shoulders wordlessly.  
Delilah, however, nodded. "Well, if you ask me, it was the right decision either way. I hope one day you will have an easier time trusting the people of this club."  
Again, I did not know what to say.  
As if called by some sort of telepathy, she got up and went outside. Moments later, her husband and her son were stepping out of the trees. Trooper was by Jake's side now, the leash in the boy's hand, but it still seemed like the dog was leading the child and not the other way around.  
I watched the small family from behind the curtain, how they talked – rather loudly and with abrupt gestures, angry but not furious. Eventually, the boy climbed into the passenger side of the truck and slammed the door. Delilah put her hand onto her husband's lower back before climbing into the truck as well, from the driver's side, taking the middle seat. Ky heaved the dog onto the bed, got into the driver's seat, and they vanished down the driveway.  
I wondered about compatibility and about the things people could give other people to thrive.

/

 **TBC**


	23. Chapter 22

_**Viking  
**_  
Pulling up to the Prez' cabin, I almost ran over the MC's princeling who jumped at me out of the bushes and hit me in the shoulder with a Nerf gun.  
"Charon fuckin' Nash!" I hollered after him as he ran away around the house with a huge smug grin on his face. "Vengeance will be mine!"  
"That's what you said last time, too," RJ said from beside me. He was wearing a stormtrooper costume, the helmet under one arm, and chewing on a twizzler. "And the time before that."  
"And I meant it last time, too, and the time before that," I told him with exaggerated patience. "That's the secret of successful vengeance, young Skywalker. Maybe in twenty years, just at the very moment your brother's getting to first base with his lady love, I'll be jumping out of the bushes and hit him in the ass with a foam finger. And then I'll have the last laugh."  
RJ seemed unconvinced about the whole scenario and kept nibbling the twizzler.  
I ruffled his hair because he hated it when I did that, the know-it-all little shit. Also, I got a kick out of ruffling the hair of a mini-Styx. I could close my eyes and superimpose regular-Styx onto my memory. It made church meetings _much_ more entertaining.  
"Are your folks inside, kid?"  
"Mom and Rhia, yeah. Dad just left."  
Perfect.  
I went in, gently knocking on the doorframe and calling Mae in a measured volume, just in case the baby was sleeping.  
"Viking!" Mae came round the corner. "Here, hold the baby."  
And suddenly my hands were full of a tiny nugget in a pink dress and a diaper, with wispy black hair, big blue wolf eyes and a rosy bow of a mouth that promptly pulled down, opened and began to cry. Loudly. Much more loudly than its size seemed to allow. Man, the kid had _lungs_.  
I really kinda liked kids, but _babies_? They didn't do anything except cry, smell good – until they shat themselves – cry, eat, cry, fuss, cry, sleep, be occasionally adorable, provide a great reason to get really drunk and celebrate, and cry.  
"So sorry I totally missed your entrance into the MC," I told the bawling baby. "I was in Mexico, getting shot. Would've liked to be home and get blind drunk in your name instead."  
She cried.  
"My name's Viking, by the way. Or Vike. Uncle Vike, if you prefer."  
She cried.  
"Eh, give it a few years and I'll be your favorite person on Earth."  
She cried, getting louder. Yeah, couldn't fault her on this one.  
"Ain't it strange, little pea," I asked her, "how they sheltered the firstborn to the point of obsession, didn't let anyone else so much as breathe into his direction until he was almost two years old, and you are barely a month on this Earth and they just randomly hand you over to the big uncle who doesn't know the first fuckin' thing about babies the moment he comes in to the door?"  
She was entirely outraged. Or maybe she just didn't like being held like I'd hold a wet corgi. I put her against my shoulder as I had seen Flame do with his kids so often, cupping her diapered butt and lower back with one hand and patting her back with the other, and did the hopping- and-rocking thing. Didn't seem to make much of a difference to Rhia, but at least her cries were a little muffled by my cut – off of which I could also easily wipe all drool, snot and tears – so I held the course on this strategy.  
"Humming helps!" Mae called from somewhere in the cabin. "She likes deep voices!"  
"Ooh, babygirl. You like deep voices, do you?" I asked the baby with my best rumbly sex hotline bass. "Seems like you're your daddy's girl through and through. I bet the purr of a Harley-Davidson puts you right to sleep."  
Yeah, baby didn't care right now, baby wanted to have a good cry. So I hummed Lordi's 'Blood Red Sandman', mostly for my own benefit, and carried her round and round the living room and kitchen – which looked like a battlefield – to pass the time.  
Mae eventually came back from whatever she had been doing and held out her arms. "I am guessing you are not simply visiting to be invaluable babysitting support?"  
I handed Rhia over again. She was unhappy about that, too. Female Styx, then. Eternally grumpy, with high standards and no peace until they were met. Styxa. Styxina. Styxissa. Heh.  
I sobered up. There was something I needed to sort out.  
"I need to know what you said to my old lady when she was here," I said to Mae and watched her face closely. Consternation. Concern. Worry, but not necessarily for herself. No surprise, though.  
"I am sorry her visit ended like it did, Vike. It was unfortunate that Bella and Rider came in at that time. It was not planned and I would have liked to avoid it, for Sarai's sake, and for Bella's and Rider's as well. It was not a good situation. Emotions ran very high."  
Or very, _very_ low, in Sarai's case, I thought. "Well, talking to your sister and our resident non-prophet sure didn't do her much good," I remarked, somewhat snidely, "but she survived those. I'm more interested in the stuff _you_ said to her."  
Mae pressed her lips together and fussed with her daughter a bit to stall. "I feel responsible for everyone here," she said defensively.  
My hackles rose. "Did you or did you not tell her that she – or I – will get kicked out or whatever if and when she screws up?"  
"I did," she said with some steel in her voice, "because it's the truth, and she deserved to know it from the start."  
I balled my fists and swore. "Fucking- Mae, that is _not_ your-"  
"That is _absolutely_ my responsibility," she spoke over me. Rhia also raised her volume accordingly and Mae grabbed a milk bottle from the pantry and shoved the rubber nipple into her mouth. Ah, silence.  
"I understand that this falls under 'old lady business', which is 'club business', and that no one gets to interfere with the woman a patched member chooses and how the treats her, and so on and so forth."  
Yeah, Mae had never really grasped that whole concept of separating the spheres and keeping the club a pussy-free zone. I blamed Styx. He went easy on her that one time, for her sister Bella's sake, and ever since then, the gates had been open, never to be closed again.  
"But you didn't just choose her, Vike. You brought her here. Right into our midst, without so much as a warning. Maddie pried the truth out of Flame because she felt that he was troubled by something and thus heard about Sarai by accident. And you did not just choose anyone, you chose a _tormentor_."  
"Sarai isn't that anymore," I defended her. "Fuck, this all happened six, seven years ago. While you were here, popping out kids left and right and living your tax-free dreams with your protective alpha-male boy-toys from MC-romance-land, she was being dragged through hell."  
"I noticed," Mae replied and pulled a sad face. "And I feel for her, I really do. It doesn't make anything undone, though. She is a victim _and_ a perpetrator now, that is all."  
"Mae. She's changed. She's been thinking about nothing but redemption." I was almost pleading now but I didn't care. Sarai needed someone besides me on her side. Or at least someone not entirely on the other side. "She would cut her own legs off with a blunt knife if she thought she could get it that way. You just... You have to give her _something. Some_ leeway."  
She let her hip rest against the kitchen counter. "I _have_ given her my endorsement. For your sake, mostly, because it is obvious that you have chosen her with your whole heart, or else you would not have chosen at all, but also because she truly meant to challenge Styx for you. She is loyal to a fault, Vike. I hope you are aware of it."  
Hearing it like that made things worse. How close I had come to actually losing her. Again. How perfectly gutsy my woman was, and how fucking devastating it would be to have to give her up.  
"That is all I can do, at this point," Mae went on, interrupting my downward spiral. "Viking, we – the others, everyone except you, basically – we do not _know_ the Sarai of now. The last impression I had of her was her shooting pastor Smith point blank and having Lilah, Maddie and me thrown into the back of a van by armed neo-Nazis to deliver us back into the hands of our rapists. Bella's and Phebe's last impression of her is even less favorable than that. I have heard the stories about her, how she was while at Judah's side, about her treatment of other people, young girls especially, at New Zion. Viking, look at me. I am holding a young girl in my arms _right now_. My sisters are raising their own young girls. Sapphira, for all her age, is still fragile and terribly young. How do you suggest we should feel about this addition to our neighborhood?" When I didn't answer – because what the hell was I supposed to say to that, except that I knew for a fact Sarai wouldn't ever touch a little girl improperly again – she remarked, "Imagine Rider moving just half a mile closer to the compound."  
I hissed. "That's different." Comparing Sarai to Rider was fucking disgraceful.  
"Is it?" she challenged. "How so?"  
I gritted my teeth. Of course she wouldn't know, or understand. Rider was club business. Pussy didn't get club business.  
"I need to protect my family, and I will," Mae ignored the lack of verbal reply. "I gave her a clear warning."  
Damn it to hell, I _already_ understood her. I just didn't like it.  
"Well, mission certainly accomplished," I snarled. "Congratulations, you have scared my bitch into thinking that she needs someone to tell her which direction she can safely _breathe_ in."  
Mae wrinkled her forehead. "Nothing I said to her was overly strict or detailed, except when it came to contact with the children, which I would like to be limited until we know her better. I warned her that everyone would keep both eyes on her. I told her to steer clear of the men and not push with the women, and to stick with you. That was all."  
"Yeah, well, my old lady doesn't do things by half. Must be due to getting her early childhood education at Child-rape For Jesus, Inc.."  
Mae visibly blanched. "What... What did she say? Or do? What happened?"  
 _She expected me to dehumanize her._ It sounded awful even in my brain. I swallowed hard.  
"Don't tell me the deets, Mae," I asked of her, with sincerity. "I don't wanna _know_ the fuckin details, okay? But... did they ever... At the cult, did the assholes there treat you like animals? With... collars and leashes and..." Another thought occurred to me. "With nose rings and such? Like y'all were just... dogs and cattle? Did they use to punish you like that there?"  
I had assumed that some Nazi had put the ring through her nose.  
What if it had been normal at the commune?  
What if she had asked her precious Judah to dig a goddamn tunnel into her septum?  
Had she stood in front of him, holding out a forceps and clamp and a barbell ring to him?  
Ah, fuck. I wanted to hurl.  
Mae was silent for a long, nauseating moment. Something dark flitted across her expression but was gone quickly. " I am sorry to say it, but _everything_ was done to us there, Viking." She hugged her daughter closer to herself.  
I turned away from her so she wouldn't have to see my face. It took a moment to clear my throat and find my voice again.  
"Sarai offered me- actually, she _begged_ me to put her on a leash today. I told her I wanted to go out with her, meet some people, mingle, you know. We'd been holed up for more than a week and I was getting a bit cabin fever, so I asked her to come out with me. She needs to be among other people, too. And outta nowhere she asks me to put her in a collar. To give her fucking instructions about how to behave at any second. Tells me she means to hold on to my belt and asks me whether I want her to make eye contact with anyone. That she expects me to punish her for disobedience. Sick and crazyshit. I thought she was joking around at first. I'd said something about keeping her on a tight leash to Ky when he and Styx and everyone came to the cabin to challenge me, but I didn't literally mean..." I blew a noisy puff of air out of my mouth. Fuck, I was jittery inside. This crap was costing me years of my life.  
"You mean, she asked you to treat her as a submissive?" Mae asked.  
"More like a subhuman slave," I scoffed and shook my head. "I can't do this. I keep thinking about her on the floor for someone…" I couldn't even say it.  
"You know, you can't fall off anything if you're already on the floor."  
I turned around to give her a pointed look. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"  
Mae smiled wryly. "Just a bit of parental wisdom, I suppose." She readjusted her grip on Rhia and patted her with her hand. "After Charon fell off his changing table for the second time, we've started changing the babies on a blanket on the floor whenever possible."  
I blinked. "Are you… comparing my old lady to a baby that needs a diaper right now?" I was unsure whether to be offended on Sarai's behalf, or my own, or in general.  
Mae giggled. "Not at all. My apologies for expressing myself too vaguely. It's just… Maybe Sarai also knows she cannot fall when she is already on the floor? Perhaps she simply yearns to feel grounded, literally."  
I was too fucked in the head to really get this metaphorical shit right now. "What are you trying to tell me, Mae?"  
"Just that the floor is not automatically a bad place to be. I guess it depends on who puts you there, and how, and for what purpose, or if you go there willingly."  
Nothing I could say to that, really.  
What did 'willingly' even mean when someone was so very messed up and confused about what they should think, do and be?  
Then I thought of the diamond will I had felt, in Clearwood, literally while pushing her to the floor.  
I would need a _lot_ more time to untangle this than I feared I had at my disposal.  
Mae thought for a second. "Or perhaps you are right, and it _does_ have to do with punishment."  
Just what I needed. Even more aspects to consider.  
"Judging by Sarai's collapse when she confronted Rider, I think that maybe she feels she deserves it. Especially for those who feel like they have much to atone for, punishment can be a relief. Just think of Lilah punishing herself for her own beauty, and how elated she was once it was done. Or think of Flame and how his slicing himself open would provide momentary relief for him. Even you yourself went to accept your own brutal punishment at the hands of your brothers that night because you knew it would be cathartic. I hope your ribs are healing fine?"  
Dazed by all that insight, I only nodded and gave her a dull "yeah, fine". I had forgotten about my damn ribs.  
"Punishment does not have to be sadistic and dehumanizing, Viking. Even if Sarai has probably never experienced it to be anything else, at the commune, at the hands of the Elders and Judah, it is not necessarily evil. Prison, for example, is a punishment, but it does not have to be cruel. It should not be cruel. Prisons should be places of discipline, clear rules, guidance and control. Once you're in there, you can do no more wrong than you already have. It provides structure. I imagine that might be very freeing for some people."  
It hurt to think that my old lady was one of those 'some people'. "I want her to really _be_ free, not just… feel free while in prison." She had _felt_ free at the commune, and they had ground their evil into her skin so deeply that she would never get rid of the stain.  
"Could it be that I should-" I started my sentence, but my throat got too tight to finish it.  
But Mae already understood. "You think that you're not right for her?"  
"Can't take it." I wanted her with me like I wanted my left lung with me, but I also didn't want her to suffer for it.  
Mae sighed. "You know, Styx was exactly the same as you. He tried to let me go, too. Allegedly for my own good. Actually, he tried to get rid of me insistently. Twice, at least."  
"No shit?" I asked, stunned.  
She nodded and laughed. "No shit."  
Fuck, that was information I needed to figure out how to use against the Prez at some opportune moment.  
"He _also_ thought I should be 'free', and that I wouldn't be, inside an MC such as this, by his side. 'It ain't me, babe', he used to say. He feared that the MC would become a prison to me, just like the commune was, and that he would become my jailor. The parallels between the two are quite obvious, if you think about it. All the sacred, immutable rules. The problems with conventional law. The isolation from the rest of society. The role allocation for men and women. The violence. The most important get-together at an MC is called 'church', for Christ's sakes, and only men are invited." She said it with a little smile and a pointedly cocked eyebrow. I held my tongue. Barely.  
"But I wanted to stay here. I still do. I would not choose any place on Earth over this cabin, nor absolute freedom over the safety of his arms. That is because I feel free with him within the safety he provides and the love he gives me. Small places with strict rules can look like prisons, yes, but four walls around us do not automatically hem us in. They can also hold us up, provide stability, and keep us from falling down. And if you leave a door open, we'll show you just how much we want to stay inside it. How much we appreciate the control you wield over us."  
"I think I need to sit down a sec," I mumbled in reply.  
Mae 'hmm'ed and invited me to sit down on her kitchen table with a gesture.  
And because she was a good fucking woman, she put a glass of water, some dried fruit snacks in front of me and made small talk with herself for the next couple of minutes – about Rhia and Kare and RJ, about making some raspberry cupcakes tomorrow, about the new private tutor Styx had suggested they get to come teach the children some math, and about the next big trip to the beach she was looking forward to – and let me digest all the things she had told me, and put it together with what Flame had said, and try and square it with Sarai's words.  
The upshot was that I was a grade-A moron. I had created unnecessary drama. I should've just listened to her, and told her I would fucking try and make it work for her, on her terms. Basically, I should've done anything but freak out and run.  
"I'm no fuckin' good with rules, Mae," I interrupted her detailed report on how they would manage to get three kids to Matagorda Bay. She fell silent.  
"I'm not a teacher, or a policeman, or a damned prison warden, or a parent," I explained. "I don't know shit about the kind of discipline you were talking about. That's why I joined a goddamn outlaw MC!"  
"I disagree," Mae said lightly. "There are plenty of rules in this MC, and you are sticking to all of them, and enforcing them. That's why you are a respected member and Secretary of almost ten years."  
"You know what I mean!" I growled, but suddenly wasn't so sure exactly what I meant, myself. She had a point, damn her. "It's- It's different with MC laws," I insisted.  
She gave me a look that said 'No, it really is not. At all.'  
"Are you afraid you will mistreat her?" Mae asked.  
 _Yes._ "No." _Yes!_  
If this duty entailed what I _thought_ it entailed, then it was an immense responsibility that came with limitless power over one person. One person who, for all her strength, was fragile and easily manipulated. More so because this person loved and trusted me.  
This power was terrifying.  
I didn't want to fuck up, but I already saw it coming.  
"No one is born a master of anything. No one would expect you to be perfect at this and not make mistakes. You will need plenty of time to figure things out between you two, and that is perfectly fine. I believe Sarai knows that you are not infallible, you know?"  
I snorted unhappily. Well, she certainly knew now.  
"A relationship like this, between two people who exchange power, just needs constant negotiation and communication. It is much like any other, 'normal' relationship, really. It simply requires more devotion."  
 _Just. Simply._ I rubbed my beard in contemplation.  
Mae stopped talking and just looked at me. I looked back, waiting for more wisdom like a thirsty man waiting for more drops of rain falling into his mouth.  
Instead, she went, "Well? What are you still doing here, moping around in my kitchen? Go talk to your woman and give her some goddamned rules! Make her happy!"  
I got up automatically and then stood there like an idiot. "I— Mae, gimme a hint, where to start with this. Anything." She lifted an eyebrow. "Please." Yeah, what could I say, I was desperate.  
For a long moment, she merely looked at me and assessed my honesty.  
Apparently, I passed the test.  
"I do not know, Vike. I hardly know Sarai," she said, clearly exasperated. "Maybe start with… bedtime? Have her go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and get up early in the morning to complete some chores? Or put her on a healthy diet? She still looked much too thin. Maybe sign her up for cooking classes. That will give her something to do, it will enable her to care for herself and her body better, it will give her the opportunity to make _you_ happy as well, _and_ she will have a topic of conversation with Lilah and me. Once she is physically healthy, put her on an exercise regimen to keep her fit and to boost her mental health. When you go out with her, have her stay within earshot of you. Include her in a conversation once you have steered it towards a topic she will feel comfortable with and contribute to. Limit the amount of attention others give her at any given moment so she does not feel antsy. And give her some other task to take her mind off the anxiety she feels from being with others. Have her count the bottles of alcohol behind the bar, or the number of left-handed people in the room."  
I felt like I should have been taking notes. Bedtime. Chores. Food. Cooking classes. Sports. Going out. Comfort. Include. Distract.  
I could do this.  
I thought I could do this.  
I could, couldn't I?  
None of this sounded disturbing.  
Actually, this sounded almost perfectly normal.  
Wait a minute.  
"None of these are… actual _rules_ ," I couldn't help but point out. There was no leash involved at all. None of this included punishment of the kind Sarai was expecting.  
In fact, I would have suggested most of these things to Sarai all on my own before long, anyway. Especially the one about food, because Sarai really was a little underweight and I didn't like that she shivered fully clothed in 75°F. The bedtime one was a no-brainer as well. It would have come about naturally, sooner or later, once this crazy period of recuperation ended and things were more business-as-usual.  
Mae lifted an eyebrow. "They are not? Well, then, phrase them as imperatives and tell her that she'll get a no-fun-spanking if she doesn't do what you say." She nodded to herself as if to say 'There. Rules.'  
I blinked.  
Whoa.  
Okay.  
"You are welcome," Mae said before I even had the chance to thank her. She motioned with her chin toward the door. "Now leave. Go to her."  
I went to the door, pulled it open, hesitated.  
"You know, it occurs to me that you are… surprisingly well-informed about this sort of stuff," I said. I mean, that had been an impressive list of ideas she had given me on how to corral Sarai's needs into something less objectionable and destructive – on the fly.  
"And it occurs to _me_ that you are not the only one whose beloved partner is dealing with feelings of inadequacy and crippling insecurities in this MC," she retorted. "Perhaps, at some point, you can have a talk with Maddie. Or with Ash. Or with Cowboy and Sia. Or with Bella, if you are feeling particularly brave. One of them has recently borrowed several of my books on the psychology of power exchanges, too. Big books with risqué-but-artsy pictures of rope bondage on the covers," she said jauntily. "I can pass them on to you, if you like? Letti has crocheted book jackets for them so they can be safely read in public."  
Well. Hadn't seen that one coming.  
I almost laughed.  
I could do this.  
I would.  
And I couldn't help myself. "Inquisitive minds wonder whether the Prez knows all about those no-fun-spankings you mentioned-"  
"Leave. Now, Vike!"

/

 **TBC**


	24. Chapter 23

_**Sarai**_

One pair of shoes, size 8.5  
One pair of thick, black socks  
One pair of soft pants, size S  
One sweater with a hood, size M  
One pair of panties, size S  
At least half a tube of toothpaste, a quarter bottle of liquid soap and shampoo, a whole roll of toilet paper  
Many meals – soups and stews, vegetables, eggs, fried meats, fish – and snacks of fruit  
Many liters of water, for drinking, for showering, for flushing the toilet and washing hands  
One Bible, lost in the woods  
I read the list again and again. It seemed… too short, like there had to be more things I had been given in the few weeks I had lived here.  
Glances. Kisses. Caresses. Orgasms.  
Words. Stories. Ideas.  
Attention. Kindness.  
Time.  
None of those I could give back.  
I finished the list and laid it on the kitchen table, next to the folded black dress, cinched together neatly with the belt, and the bra.  
To keep my hands busy, I braided and re-braided my hair into a demure fishtail, then swept and mopped both bedrooms, changing the sheets for clean ones.  
I heard a motorcycle pull up and the air seemed to go out of the cabin. _Maybe it isn't him. Maybe it's Ash or someone else. He wanted to go to the social event. He went without you._  
The door opened and I heard him call my name.  
I stifled a cry with my fist against my lips and breathed through the pain that washed through me.  
The silence when he found the list and the items on the table was deafening.  
I expected him to either leave again right away, or to come to me and… I could not say what he might do. I know he heard me in the bedroom, maybe even saw my shadow against the wall opposite the door.  
Instead, he waited.  
Eventually, I braced my soul and my heart and went to him.  
He sat there and looked me up and down in my overlarge sweatshirt, the stretchy pants and the shoes that were slightly too large. The single sheet of paper lay next to his hand on the table.  
"What do you think you're doin', sugarbun?" he asked very calmly.  
"I will restitute all the things on that list." Breathe. "I am afraid I do not know yet, how long it will take, seeing that I have no income with which to purchase these things." Breathe. "I could not estimate the value of the food and drink I have consumed, so you can—"  
"No," he interrupted, and repeated, "What do you think you're _doin_ `?"  
"I am leaving."  
If I said it enough times, it would get simpler.  
"Why do you think you're leavin'?" he asked.  
Breathe.  
"Because I do not wish to be to you what Jake is to Delilah and her husband."  
Viking's eyebrows rose. He clearly did not know what had taken place. I had never told him about my first run-in with Jake, either.  
"I do not wish to cause you any more strife with your family than I already have." I had rehearsed this in my head frequently. "I do not wish to force you to isolate yourself from them due to my presence. I do not wish to make you feel inadequate in the face of my—" My breath hitched. "My perversion. I do not wish to poison your heart. I—"  
"Perversion," he repeated my word.  
"Yes," I said. It came out like a hiccup. I gasped for breath. "I understand it much better now. I am not made to be free like… you. Like women are in this place. I need a rigor and strictness that disgust you. I do not want to be a burden, and I cannot live with myself knowing that I am one. Therefore, I cannot stay by your side."  
I wished I could explain myself better, but everything inside of me balked and the words slipped from my mind. It was like talking against a strong wind.  
Viking only nodded slowly. "You done?"  
No. Not at all. Not even close. I had so many glances, kisses, caresses and orgasms, so many words, stories and ideas, so much attention, kindness and time to give back to him. It was stored inside of me to the point that I might burst at the seams.  
I nodded and swallowed the 'no' back down hard. "Will you... Will you take me to the border of the club's property?" I had checked the map that had been in the very first box. There appeared to be an interstate a few miles to the northwest from here that I assumed was not in the hands of the Devil's men. Perhaps I would find my way from there.  
"No." He shook his head once, decisively.  
I was stumped. "Then, someone else-"  
"No," he repeated, dashing my suggestion before I had even finished.  
My stomach tightened. The prospect of hiking through the woods was not a heartening one. My body was not sturdy. "I will leave on foot, then."  
Again, he shook his head, "No."  
I frowned and felt a twinge of anger rise inside of me. Why did he have to make this more unbearable? "I do not understand."  
"I'll gladly spell it out for you, sugarbun." He locked his eyes with mine. "You ain't going anywhere. Your ass is staying right where it is, perversions and all."  
"I—" Well, now I was really angry. Had he not been listening at all? "Why?"  
"Because I don't want you to." As he said it, he got up from his chair and came towards me very slowly. "Because I won't let you. Because you're my old lady and I fuckin' love you. And because you don't get to run when I tell you to fucking stay. And I'm telling you to stay."  
My heart seemed to turn in circles in my chest. Burning heat bloomed under my navel.  
"You cannot mean that," I said tonelessly and inched backwards.  
"I _cannot_ , can I?" he asked and followed me. "Is this you, trying to give me orders and tell me what to do? Again?"  
"You said, you… you wouldn't…" I trailed off.  
"I was wrong, Sarai, and I'm sorry."  
I did not know what to say. I had never heard a man say those words in my life.  
"I shouldn't have run off like an ass. You… The leash-thing just blindsided me. My—" He took a deep breath. "My sister put me on a leash. That time after we—I killed our mother. It was part of her revenge for—uh, doing that without her, and partially I think she just got off on seeing me walk around on hands and knees and piss against a tree." He breathed again and mumbled something that sounded like 'can't believe I just told you that'.  
Again, I did not know what to say.  
"The thought that some sick motherfuckers did that to you in the past, and that they made you like it because you were so starved for affection you'd take anything…? I couldn't stand it. Still can't."  
He lifted his hands to my cheeks, cupping my face. His hands were so big and warm.  
"I swear, I won't be like them. I will be _better_ than them. I will handle you properly, even if it'll take me so much fucking time and patience and all of your help to figure out how to do that. Do you trust me to do that?"  
It was as if he had taken every single word I had ever wanted to hear and put them into a speech. Part of me was certain I was merely dreaming.  
He saw my hesitation and curled his lip into a smirk.  
"You need it more official than that? Fine, you hard-ass. I'll fucking marry you, in front of God or whoever, in a real church. Your vow will include the word 'obey'. You'll wear my ring on your finger to remind you that you're shackled to me and I to you, and at the end of that day and every day after that, that ring will be the only thing you're wearing, unless I tell you otherwise."  
I opened my mouth, but only a pathetic, whimpering sound came out.  
Viking tightened his grip on my cheeks a little. "Say 'yes', Sarai."  
I was surprised he could not hear the word rushing in my blood, its rhythm hammered against my ribs by my heart. "Yes." Too quiet. "Yes." Not loud enough. "Yes!"  
"You'll stay here."  
"Yes."  
"You won't run away from me."  
"No."  
"Say it."  
"I will stay here. With you. I will not run away. I will-" Breathe. "I will marry you."  
He searched my eyes for even a spark of doubt, but found none. "Good," he said, sounding pleased. He lowered his hands. "On your knees."  
I blinked at him.  
"You've given me your submission before," he reminded me, taking half a step backwards. "I've come to fucking collect it now. On your knees."  
Every one of my senses was attuned to him and lit up at his demeanor, but at the same time, my bladder clenched in something like fear. "Vike, I-"  
"ON YOUR KNEES!" he boomed and stared right in my eyes, a solid, furious challenge in them.  
Almost instantly, I crashed to the floor. My knees even throbbed a little from the friction of my pants and the reverb shivered up my body, all the way to the crown of my head. Vike took another step towards me until his feet were almost in line with my knees to both sides and he was so close I could smell the jeans fabric of his pants.  
"Look me in the eyes."  
Heart pounding, I looked up, and _up_. My breath shuddered out of me. I had never forgotten that he was tall, but at this moment, he was like an avalanche looming over me, ready to crush me. The fear I had of him when I first saw him sitting next to me in hospital reared its head again. Soon, I would be forever bound to this man.  
"Beautiful," he said.  
And just like that, he knocked my breath away. Such a small compliment, but still I was undone. The fear sweetened into something else.  
"Don't drop your eyes," Vike bit out, and my gaze snapped up again. "You look at me. You're not some meek and timid slave. I want _you_ , and you're the fucking opposite of timid. You're the ballsy bitch that tried to hit me with a plastic sign. The one who went to the Prez' house with a gun for me. I want you as you are, not playing someone else. This is not going to be some theater act." He reached down, touched my cheek. His hand felt huge against it. "And I want to see your fucking beautiful face whenever possible. Do you understand me?"  
I nodded while my stomach was fluttering.  
"And I also want your fucking words, sugarbun. When I ask you a question, you answer me and you use your voice. You tell me exactly what's on your fucking mind, every single time. Believe me when I say that you won't like it if I catch you holding back or withholding something from me. I'm getting nothing less than _all_ of you. Likewise, be sure that I will tell you exactly what I want from you, every single time, and you can and will ask me to clarify whenever I don't make sense. So let's try this again. Do you understand me?"  
"I understand," I said. "I will look at you. You wish to see my face, so I will look at you. I will… I will be myself and you will be yourself, without artifice. And we will… talk frankly. I will try my best to follow these rules." In the end, I could not help but add, "Sir."  
"Fuck me," he groaned. "Do you _want_ to call me that, Sarai?"  
I hesitated. "If-"  
"Not ' _if it would please me'_ , sugar. This ain't about _me_. Do _you_ want to call me that?"  
"I..." I thought for a moment. "It… It seems appropriate when I am on my knees before you like this... Sir."  
He looked me in the eyes for a moment, clearly dissatisfied with my inconclusive answer. Then, he let it go.  
"Why do you think you are on your knees, sugarbun?"  
I swallowed on a dry mouth. I felt my cheeks get hot. _Because you told me to_ was the first thought that came to my mind, but another, more insistent voice inside my head chimed in.  
 _Because I want to be_ , _I am on my knees because_ I _went to my knees.  
_ I _did, all by myself._  
But this should not be about me, no matter what he said.  
"To service you," I answered.  
"Don't think I didn't notice you hesitating," he said darkly.  
I swallowed hard and fought against the need to avert my eyes.  
"To service me, eh?" he continued. "And how would you do that?"  
Another nervous flutter swept through me.  
"I can—Can I show you, Sir?" I wanted to reach for him, give my hands something to do because they were dangling uselessly, awkwardly at my sides.  
"I don't want you to _show_ me," Vike answered and shook his head. "Any club slut can _show_ me. I want _you_ to _tell_ me. In detail."  
"I—" I fell silent, tongue-tied. His crotch was right before my face. The need to please him with a touch was itching within me, but he was demanding something else, something more complicated and difficult. I was not sure I could give him what he wanted.  
"Where would you put your hands, sugar?" he asked me.  
"O-on your thighs," I replied. My cheeks and the tips of my ears got warm. I remembered thinking about those thighs before. Big, strong thighs, hard and defined by muscle.  
"You wanna give them a good rub?" he asked, obviously pleased with the idea.  
"Yes, Sir," I nodded, inhaling deeply to calm my nerves. "I think I would very much like to touch them. I could… run my palms up and down them. Massage them."  
"Yeah, you could," he murmured with a small smile twitching in his beard.  
"And then," I hurried to say, encouraged by that smile, "I would open the button of your trousers, and pull down the tab of your fly."  
His eyes gleamed.  
Blue was not a cold color, after all.  
"Keep going."  
"I… I would reach inside. Inside your trousers. I would- I would pull out your…" _Penis. Member. Manhood. Shaft._  
"Cock," he prompted. "Say it."  
"I would pull out your _cock_ ," I repeated dutifully, then bit my lip.  
Vike reached down again, pulling my lip free from my teeth with the pad of his thumb. With a gentleness that made my heart flutter, he continued to rub at my lip with his thick, rough digit. "What are you keeping from me, Sarai?" he asked, keeping my eyes prisoner with his. "What is it that you're not fucking saying right now? I can see the cogs working. I wanna know. Tell me."  
Something about that demand, the eye contact, the touch, made me want to utterly floor him. I drew a long breath.  
"I am thinking about your cock. I want to know if you have hair there, like me, and what color it is. I want to know how tender the skin of your sac is. I am wondering how your cock would feel against the skin of my face, and my lips. I want to know how it smells and tastes. I wonder exactly how big it is. I want to know if it is hard but soft to the touch. I want to kiss it. I—I want to know if my kisses would make it cry."  
Vike looked at me for a long time, letting the words sink in. Eventually, he took half a step back, leaned down, pulled me as far up as I could go by my lower jaw, and crashed his lips to mine. He stole a harsh, hot kiss that went on and on but was over far too quickly. "Fucking amazing," he murmured against my tingling lips, then stood upright again, leaving me down on the floor on noodly legs, my backside now resting on the heels of my feet. I was glad that I was already kneeling. I laid my hand against my sternum to still my pattering heart.  
Vike cleared his throat and adjusted the massive bulge in his pants, then took a steadying breath – with just a little shudder in it – and continued with the lecture.  
"This position will be called position one. When I tell you that I want you in position one, it means that I want to see you on your knees, looking up at me, hands behind your back, legs braced on the floor and lips nice and wet just in case I want to fuck your pretty face. Understand?"  
 _Fuck my face_ \- I felt a rush of liquid between my nether lips. I nodded and affirmed, "Yes, Sir. Position one." My exhalation was a little unsteady.  
He walked around me until he was right behind me. I turned my head, remembering that he wanted to see my face at all times if possible. Incidentally, I wanted to see his, too, as much as such was possible with my low vantage point and his towering height.  
"In the next position, I want you to show me your ass, your asshole and your cunt."  
Processing his words and blushing furiously at the idea, I slowly lowered my upper body and braced my palms against the floor. I peeked at him over my shoulder. "Like this?"  
"I can see your beautiful ass, sugarbun." He was indeed looking down at it like he was seconds away from taking a bite out of my buttocks. I tried not to feel stupid pride at that. "I like looking at it a whole damn lot. But I told you that I want you to show me your asshole and your cunt, too. Gotta try harder."  
I bent my back and tilted my pelvis, but I already knew that it would not be enough. The angle was not right. He was too tall and too close to me to see what he wanted that way. So I bent my elbows and put my forehead onto the floor, then slid forward a little. That way, my behind was all the way in the air and my private parts were on display, even clad in pants as they were.  
"Now spread your legs a little more," he said, and I complied and slid my knees further apart. My spine bent even further, my belly button sagging toward the floor, and my fundament tilted another few inches to face up at him.  
"Perfect," he groaned."God, look at this. Is this all mine?"  
"Yes, Sir," I hushed. The place between my legs was throbbing in the same rhythm as my heart. I clenched my fingers against the floor, pulling my arms into my sides for more stability. The wood was polished and a little slippery, especially with my palms sweating as they did.  
"This is position two. How do you like it?"  
The question stunned me. Did I like it? "I—"  
"Do you feel comfortable, sugar?"  
I was not _un_ comfortable. But that was not his question. "I… do not know."  
Why did I not know this? Why could I not tell whether I was comfortable or not? Was this not a sense that every human being had? Just like everyone knew whether they felt hot or cold, stood upright or were lying down, everybody could say at any time whether they liked something and felt comfortable – so why was I unable to?  
I moved my arms to get back on my hands and knees and eventually back on my feet. I suddenly was not sure at all anymore what I was doing – here, in this moment, in this house, with this man. I felt like maybe I should… run away. Catch my breath. Regain my composure. Find my answers.  
Before my head even left the floor, his hand was between my shoulder blades and kept me pressed down without any effort, his body covering mine almost delicately, but with an undeniable weight. As if he had read my thoughts and had known that I was about to bolt.  
"Do you feel sexy, Sarai?" he asked, his voice low.  
Such a little gesture, so few words, but they set my entire body on fire, and my mind right along with it. He was stronger than me. He could break me so easily. But he would not. Instead, he wanted to hold me, grab me and put me wherever he wanted. Use me, and use me well, make me feel _useful_.  
He _enjoyed_ me.  
I whimpered. " _Now_ I do, Sir." The answer slipped out of my mouth without my explicit consent. I felt my face and ears get hot. I did not remember every feeling 'sexy' before. Alluring and arousing, maybe, but there was more to 'sexy', deeper layers of significance. There was a spark of strength and agency in it that was entirely unfamiliar to me.  
"Good. That's real good," he said. "Because you are fucking sexy." His hand slid forward and downward along my spine to the back of my neck that was warm and a little sweaty underneath my braided hair. His fingers against my naked skin sent goose bumps all over my body.  
"I bet if you weren't wearing pants right now, you would drip onto my floor, wouldn't you?"  
I nodded, truthfully. "Yes, Sir. I think so." He gave a contented sort of rumble that tingled in my core.  
"What do you want me to do to you in this position?"  
His hand was giving my neck a slow massage. It was very distracting.  
"I _said_ ," he insisted when I was stuck for an answer, and tightened that grip around my neck just a fraction, "What do you want me to do to you in this position, Sarai? I know you have some ideas. Tell me."  
"I want you to lick me." I had to force out the words and then felt a drop fall into the gusset of my panties. I shivered.  
"Lick what?" he probed, as I had already feared he would.  
 _My nethers. My hidden place. My lower lips._ "My cunt," I sobbed out, but my toes curled at the unspoken other vision that went through my head. I remembered him telling me about the usage of my… my wetness. It had not left my mind.  
"Go on," he demanded as if he could feel the presence of that vision in my thoughts. His fingers speared into my hair, petting and pulling it just a little. It thrilled me.  
"My… my… back door," I admitted quietly and fought the need to cover my face with my hands and accuse this awful, crude man of putting these thoughts in my head.  
Viking chuckled, undoubtedly at my choice of words. "You ever had a tongue in your tender little hole, sugar? Anyone ever kiss and suck you there?"  
"No," I answered. "Never." Judah had done many things with my body, but never that. It would have dirtied him. All the other men, those irrelevant ghosts, had never _kissed_ any part of me at all.  
"You're going to fucking love it," Vike promised. "Not as much as I'm going to love doing it to you, but don't you worry. I'll make it good for you." Then leaned in a little closer to my ear. "Just thinking about how loudly you're gonna moan and how your pussy is gonna cream is making my cock twitch, sugarbun," he confided, and pushed the evidence of his words against my thigh and buttock. "You're gonna taste so fucking good, too. I'm going to feast on that quivering little hole until you cum."  
"Vike…" I gasped. My _pussy_ was _creaming_ already right now, just thinking about it, as I lay here on the floor, with my buttocks and private parts high in the air like a bitch in heat, and the most dangerous man I had ever known holding me down by the neck, firmly and irresistibly but also gently- I whimpered his name again and wriggled my butt as if that would ease the ache in my nether regions.  
"Fuck, woman. You are so fucking responsive," Vike said, sounding awed, his voice thick with arousal. "You have the best fucking brain I have ever known. I'm going to have so much fun corrupting that shit and making your thoughts so filthy you'll be wet and ready for me twenty-four seven."  
Wet. Ready. That's how he wanted me – _me!_ – and that's what I was for him. The sheer relief and pleasure of how well these two things fit together made me tremble all over, and a realization hit me so hard my breath fled from my body.  
I had found it. My place in this world.  
Right here, on the floor.  
With him, with a man who knew me and wanted me anyway, a man who _wanted_ to reign over me and who _I_ wanted to reign over me.  
It was unexpected. Not at all what I had been promised, or dreamed of. It was very different from what my pride, that useless, broken, shrill voice inside my head, wanted.  
It was perfect.  
Overwhelming joy brought fat tears to my eyes that fell in spite of myself, and before I knew what was happening, I was cradled against a massive, solid chest. He was stroking my hair and mumbling soothing nonsense. I clutched at him and allowed myself to become soft and weak. Just for a moment.  
For once, my head did not ache from crying.  
Once the tears had ceased and only their shuddering in my chest remained, Vike turned my face up to his with his fingers under my chin. His blue eyes met mine. "Talk to me."  
Dozens of things suddenly wanted out of my head, out through my mouth, as if a brake had been released. I had many things that wanted to be said, asked and demanded, but the first words that made it out were, "May I stay?"  
Immediately, I regretted them. He had _already_ told me I would stay. Why did I doubt his word? I should have apologized for my earlier behavior instead, should have promised that I would make it up to everyone I had wronged, that I would change even though I didn't know _how_ yet, that I would ask everyone for forgiveness personally. I should have explained my feelings, my tears. I should have asked about _his_ feelings, should have offered to ease his needs which were still evident in his trousers. I was doing _everything wrong-_  
"Fuck yeah, you will," Vike said simply. "You'll stay right fucking here."  
It was an order. I did not get to question it. I did not _have to_ question it.  
I smiled into his chest.

/

 _ **Viking**_

The wedding day lasted a full twenty-four hours, starting at one in the morning when my brothers got me out of bed by standing at outside our bedroom window with air horns.  
Fuckers.  
Three liters of red bull-spiked coffee (or plain green tea with citrus) later, Sarai and I went our parted ways to get ready for church. Not MC church, but actual bells-and-crucifixes church.  
The whole white-dress-black-suit(-and-cut)-part was over rather quickly, the ceremony held in a small and sort of dilapidated but bright little old church in Austin, by a tiny old man in a dress. Or priest's robe. Same difference. I didn't much care what he said, honestly, apart from the "man and wife" and the "you may kiss the bride"-bits. Also, slightly disappointed he didn't start the sermon with "Mawwage is what bwings us together today." Harper would be so bummed when I told her.  
Sarai said her vows holding on to my hands. Love, cherish, obey. They were synonyms to her. I was still only starting to get my head around that.  
AK and Phebe and Flame and Maddie were there as witnesses. Ash had also come along, but he had stayed outside to "watch the bikes and stuff". Personally, I assumed it had more to do with Sapphira who had tagged along with Phebe – as a sign that she had accepted my apology for chasing her through the trees while high and drunk and stupid – but then not been quite brave enough to leave the car.  
Youths and their strange courting rituals.  
Sarai looked stunning in her simple, straight white wedding dress, courtesy of Beauty. It had long, slim sleeves and a high collar and looked almost demure, but when she turned around – bam. White see-through lace with a delicate floral pattern all the way down her back, and _goodness gracious_ , that _ass_. I kept making comments about it all day, too, because with her hair up in a looping braid, her ears were on display and it was fucking adorable when they went as red as a pair of stop signs.  
The real celebration began at our cabin when we got back in the afternoon. All my brothers and their old ladies had brought lawn chairs and material for some camp fires as well as a couple of tables and benches for the 100-people-buffet that Lilah was whipping up in the kitchen. People were scattered around the trees around our cabin in little groups, eating, drinking, singing, dancing, playing games and just hanging out. The kids could run around and play. When darkness fell, they switched on the fairy lights they had hung up in the trees. In all, three dozen people hung around, ate, drank and shot the shit. Nothing too rowdy. No club sluts, only tame little brawls. It was fucking fantastic.  
Like a bunch of angels, the other old ladies – Mae, Maddie and Lilah specifically – made sure that Sarai never had enough time to stop and think too long about what in the shit she was getting herself into. Whenever she wasn't glued to my side (or onto my thigh, or giving me a surprise blowjob in the bathroom like the best fucking bride on this planet, or having a quick power-nap in bed because I told her to after seeing her suppress a yawn again) someone came along and put something in her hands – a gift, a piece of cake, a casserole, a baby, a toy, a suspicious big book with a crocheted book jacket – and kept her occupied. The munchkins, especially RJ for some reason, also helped distract her, even though I noticed that she didn't really relax around them.  
I had told her to listen and engage for at least twenty seconds with every interaction, and simply excuse herself and come over to me when she couldn't take it for any longer than that. That happened only twice the whole evening. I was so fucking proud of her.  
Before long, the munchkins had to be put to bed. The grown-ups who hadn't spawned yet stayed, and some of the parents came back up to party on. Fuckin' Tanner came by at the twenty-second hour – without Adelita, grumbling something about morning sickness. I laughed and routed him over to where AK was sitting and nursing his beer with Phebe sleeping on his lap.  
Eventually, though, even I was ready to call it a day and take my wife – _my fucking wife_ – to bed.  
"Gotta say thank you, it was great and everything. Real great. Legendary, in fact, best wedding in the history of weddings." I saluted the last hang-arounds from where I was balancing on a plastic chair. "Y'all can literally give up on the whole institution because nothing will ever come close to this event. Ever. Sucks to be you."  
Someone threw a solo cup at me. I dodged and laughed.  
"Seriously, both Sarai and I appreciate you fuckers. But it is now time for you to fuck off, 'cause y'all don't get to hear me railing my wife."  
Some laughter, some boo's (fuckin' Slash), but within half an hour, the party was dismantled, most of the trash was managed, the leftover food was distributed evenly, and everyone went home.  
By two in the morning, I was finally alone with my betrothed.  
I found Sarai in the kitchen. She was washing the dishes because I had told her to get started with the clean up inside the cabin, away from the noise caused by drunk bikers trying to pack their shit in the half-dark.  
While it was fucking wrong on many levels for a bride to wash up in the middle of the night of her wedding day in her wedding gown, I fucking did appreciate the way her ass jiggled when she scrubbed the baking dishes. So I pulled the living room chair over, settled down in it to watch her, and it. And to comment on her technique, because I was a helpful sort of person.  
Her ears went red, but she didn't stop until it was all done.  
I had the best wife. Using my hands, my mouth, my cock and my words, I told her so. Repeatedly. She was unbelievably sweet. Never thought I'd go for sweetness, but there it was. My preferred club sluts had usually been heavy on the salt and vinegar. But Sarai was sugar on my tongue, and in my nose, and on my skin, and lovely to see and hear as she moaned and writhed for me. She offered herself to me, in any way at all, without me even asking.  
So this was the difference between fucking and making love.  
With Sarai, turned out, I liked a mixture of both.  
A couple of hours later, after plenty of orgasms, we were sitting on the front step because that's where she wanted to sit to cool down and watch the sun rise over the trees. Judging by how her eyelids drooped and how heavily she leaned against my shoulder, she'd be asleep in a couple of minutes though and completely miss the dawn.  
I wouldn't wake her up. If I had anything to say about it, we had hundreds and thousands of mornings like this one ahead of us and could watch the sunrise on every single one of them if we felt like it.  
"This is like a new chapter," Sarai suddenly spoke up. She fiddled with the slim silver band on her left ring finger. It was a very simple design. No stones or engravings, just a plain silver double band that formed an infinity knot.  
I had put that ring there and she would never get to take it off.  
"More like a new era," I said, looking at the thick platinum band on my own ring finger. It had a complicated but symmetrical design of a braid on it. It reminded me of Sarai's hair. She said it reminded her of ropes. Fair enough. I liked ropes, too.  
When I held out my hand, she laid hers into my palm and twined her fingers in mine.  
"It's all new. Like a blank page." Her fingers pulled a little tighter. They were always a little colder than mine. "It reminds me of writing therapy. I always found blank pages daunting. I never really wanted to… ruin that pristine paper. And I never knew what to write. Or how to begin."  
She looked out to the tips of the trees that were still twinkling with fairy lights. The sky was turning a lighter shade of gray now, and the night was imperceptibly giving way to the dawn.  
It was so fucking romantic I had to suppress a groan.  
"You know, I didn't use to go to school a lot as a kid," I told her, "what with us living so far from civilization being a fuckin' buncha' hermit sociopaths and all. But when I did, after… _after_ , we had a writing assignment or some shit like that, I always started by putting down my name. Upper right corner. Last name, comma, first name, middle name. That's the one thing school taught me. Last name, comma, first name, middle name." I shrugged. "Well, that, and something about mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, whatever the fuck that means."  
When I closed my eyes, I could still picture those assignments. Fuck, my handwriting had been atrocious, and the stuff I had written hadn't exactly been Shakespeare. No wonder my teachers had all hated me. Between my chicken scrawl, my potty mouth and my laugh, I must have been a thoroughly obnoxious little shit. Or big shit. I had been head and shoulders above most of them.  
Sarai bit her lower lip. "So… I would also put my name first? My… my last name?"  
I nodded. "Matberg."  
My father's last name, as noted down on my newest fake ID and the real-but-not marriage certificate. Tanner's wedding gift to me.  
I hadn't asked him about pappa's first name. It would come to me, or it wouldn't.  
"That's your last name now, but it'll come first." _And it'll stay that way. Deal with it._  
"Matberg," she echoed. "Matberg, comma, Sarai." She fell silent, then whispered, "Sarai Matberg."  
The name hung between us for a while. Even in the half-darkness I could see the frown on her face, the crease between her eyebrows, and I tightened my grip on her fingers to get her attention. "Words."  
"It sounds… It does not sound right," she said unhappily, then looked at me as if for guidance. "Do you not think so? It sounds strange. They do not sound like one name for one person. It sounds like two names still. Like I am two people."  
I considered for a moment and eventually huffed out a breath. "So pick a new one."  
She blinked. "A new what?"  
"A new first name. And maybe a middle name, too. Something you like. Anything." I grinned. "The last name is non-negotiable at this point." It was ridiculous that that felt so good.  
My woman, my _wife_ , my _old lady_ , sat silently next to me for a while, thinking hard. I figured that names were a big deal for someone just on the brink of finding out who they were and what they were doing with their life.  
After a long silence, she inclined her head as if she had come to a decision and leaned against my shoulder. "I wish for you to give me a first name, Ulfr."  
Gods, this woman. So much trust to give, and so eager to give it. To me, that is.  
"Alright. I can do that," I rasped out. "Tomorrow, or something. Give me some time." She seemed satisfied with that and cuddled against me to get more comfortable.  
Hours later, the sun was coming up behind the trees. The bright orange of the sky made her blond hair look like spun flames where spilled across my thighs. Some time ago, she had fallen asleep and slowly slipped down my arm. I had arranged her upper body in my lap, hoping to make her a little more comfortable. I had taken off my cut and laid it over her shoulders to keep her back a little warmer. She had put the wedding dress back on after our lovemaking.  
"Is it tomorrow already?" she asked quietly, surprising me. I hadn't noticed her waking. Her eyes were still closed. Her voice was heavy and tired, but only from lack of sleep. She sounded content.  
I brushed a hand over her head. Her hair was so fucking soft against my calloused fingers. The shell of her ear was a perfect little whorl of pink. Fuck, I wanted to lick it. "I think it's always 'today', sugarbun."  
She smiled without opening her eyes. "Is that my official new name, then? Sugarbun Matberg?"  
"Only for me," I said. "It's your second middle name which I'm going to call you by when I want you naked in my bed. Or on my cabin floor. Or on the kitchen counter. Or on the fucking washing machine. Or on the stairway. Or just generally naked."  
She chuckled, cracking open one eye and looking at me out of the corner of it. "The cabin does not have a stairway."  
"Then I'll build one, so I can fuck you on it."  
She laughed once and covered her ear with her hand.  
I grabbed her wrist and quietly told her, "No. Let me see."  
She complied and swiped her hair behind her ear as if to preen for me.  
Shit, I was developing an ear fetish.  
"So you will call me by that new name often?" she asked with a hopeful note in her voice, and I did notice how she wriggled her hips around a little to clench her thighs together. Surreptitiously.  
My wife was a sneaky, horny little thing. A perfect match to the obvious, horny big thing that was me.  
"All the fucking time," I swore solemnly. Damn straight.  
She wriggled some more and shifted her shoulders around until the back of her head was cradled against my thighs and she could really look up at me. "It is my _second_ middle name? So I have a _first_ middle name now?"  
I looked in her eyes. They gleamed in the morning light. "Yes, you do. It's Hildr. It means 'fight'. You're a fighter, so it suits you." He would tell her all about valkyries and great battles some other time.  
I wanted to ask 'Do you like it?', but I didn't have to. Her smile was even brighter than the sun, and the blush on her cheeks more lovely than the sunrise. How crazy, that a simple middle name would make her so happy – and that the act of givingher a middle name was enough to make me feel like a fucking god.  
"I fucking love it when you smile," I told her and inwardly called myself a pussy. All this shit about feelings, man. I was gonna get my period, start the waterworks and get a craving for Hershey's any second now.  
Then again, I had told her to communicate with me, always, to use her words. I had to set examples. Later, in bed (or on the sofa, or in the shower, or across the seat of my bike), the retribution would be amazing.  
"And my first name?" she asked like Harper asked about Christmas presents.  
"Ylva," I said and spelled it out for her.  
She imitated me. "Eel-wah?"  
I corrected her pronunciation slightly. Shorter, spikier 'ee'. Softer 'wa'. A velvety kind of sound.  
"Ylva," she repeated correctly, once, twice. "Ylva." She pressed her lips together and swallowed. "That's me. Ylva." There were actual tears in her eyes. "It is a beautiful name."  
I nodded. "So it suits you, too." _A beautiful name for a beautiful bitch.  
_ My _beautiful bitch._ I couldn't help the satisfied smirk. "Ylva Hildr _Sugarbun_ Matberg."  
"Does it have a meaning?" She cocked her head so our eyes were more aligned. "Ylva? It is old Norse, too, right? Like Hildr, and Ulfr? What does it mean?"  
At this rate, smug grin would probably take up permanent residence on my face.  
"Means you're no fucking princess. Means you're my match," I said. "It translates to 'she-wolf'."

/

 **TBC**


	25. Epilogue

_**Epilogue**_

The cookout was in full swing already. Munchkins were running around the grass like a bunch of Duracell bunnies on LSD, their helium giggling and screams of excitement filled the air. From over at the side, I could hear a baby wail.  
Fuck me, I had missed them these last two months.  
Clusters of people sat and stood around or splashed in the waist-high water of one of the lagoons in McKinney state park. If it weren't for the cuts on display, the bikes parked in the shade, and the open fire right across from the big ass sign prohibiting bikes and open fires, it might've been a regular big family outing.  
Damn. The Hades Hangmen had turned into the fucking petit bourgeoisie. There wasn't even any classic rock playing.  
Although the sun was going to set in less than an hour, it was almost 85 degrees out, sweltering hot. Still, her hand in mine was cold. She walked a little behind me instead of beside me, no matter how much I slowed my steps, and I knew she was using me as a shield. When I glanced at her, her face was down, but I could see her watching the group around Mae, Lilah and Bella surreptitiously from beneath her eyelashes. The old ladies and a couple of female unknowns – maybe from birthing classes or something – were sitting or lying in the shade on a huge blanket, surrounded by snacks and the occasional toddler, eating, napping, talking.  
I strategized. This was the new normal now, my new way of thinking. Ever since the day she said she would stay and I told her I would try, this was the one train of thought in my head. How to be good for her. How to be worthy of the trust she put in me every day. How to care well for her long term. What was helpful for her and me and us. Control, punish, comfort, distract, include, reward.  
It sounded exhausting in theory, but wasn't. It was immensely gratifying and just plain fucking _fun_.  
I could do this.  
I would do this.  
Even though I wanted to not even let her loose in the first place, but even Flame put his bitch down every once in a while, so I had to, too. Otherwise, the others would never let me hear the end of it. Bad enough that I had just announced that I'd take Ylva on an eight-week honeymoon trip from Austin to Miami to Los Angeles and back without even thinking of asking the club, and then just packed my shit and left.  
I would do this.  
"They will be curious to hear all about your journey, sugarbun. Go and tell them all about it."  
Ylva looked at me and bit her lip. Her face said 'not convinced'.  
"It's true," I assured her. "Most of them have barely even been to Austin. They'll ask all sorts of nosy ass questions. You're the expert on the United States' south now."  
"I am not, though," Ylva frowned. I knew she thought she had only barely scratched the surface. And yeah, we had done lots of very basic things, things she would have grown up with if only her mother hadn't been such a massive cunt. The trip to McDonald's had almost blown her mind, and I had almost developed an aneurysm from suppressing the sheer anger I felt on her behalf.  
Ylva chewed on her lip and I could see her pretty brain conjuring up scenarios of how this conversation with the other old ladies would go, most of them bad. Consequences, punishment, rejection. In many ways, my girl was so much more vulnerable than any of the other cult bitches had ever been.  
If I ever found a magic lamp and had three wishes, I would wish for Ylva's bitch of a mother to rise from the dead so I could kill her again. Three times. And then I'd go dig up another lamp so I could do the same to Prophet Fucknut.  
"Doesn't matter 'cause _they_ won't know that," I reminded her, then assumed the stance which signaled to her that I wanted her full attention. She gave it immediately.  
"You're gonna go over there and talk. You can tell them the truth or lie to them, I don't care, but you'll sit and talk to them, or listen to them for at least fifteen minutes. After that, I'll come over and butt in, and I'll let you decide whether you stay, or we both stay, or I carry you into the woods and lick your cunt until you scream."  
Her eyes went a little wide and she looked over to the woods. I laughed. So eager.  
"If the others beg you not to leave and tell them more, or if I catch you in the middle of a good conversation," I amended, leaning closer to her ear, "I'll even let you cum when I lick you. Understand?"  
The tips of her ears went red and I could see her nipples harden to little points under her little blue shirt. She huffed pathetically and pulled her woolen cardigan closer around herself to shield her overzealous, treacherous tits from sight. "Not fair," she hushed and looked over to the group of women again, seemingly much more determined to join this time.  
"Way fair," I chuckled and smacked her ass. "Now go earn your orgasm, wolfling. See you in fifteen minutes."  
She jumped and gasped at the smack and I knew that she'd just cum a little. The last two months had been very educational when it came to my wife's buttons and how to push, pull, smack, slap, caress, fondle, tweak, tickle or ignore them. It was the most fun I had ever had with any woman, and that was all just foreplay. Actually, more like pre-foreplay. It was agonizing, my balls felt like lead weights, and all that build-up made me cum so hard I almost blacked out, every single time. I loved it.  
Plus, that ass. I watched her go – she didn't look over her shoulder even once like a woman on a mission – just to make sure that she made it safely across the minefield of munchkins playing with their nerf guns and frisbees and handeggs, and to appreciate those two apples bobbing. The thought that one of them was just a little reddened from my hand had me biting the inside of my cheek.  
This was a family meeting. Couldn't sprout a twelve inch boner here.  
Before I could change my mind and take my woman for a short walk in the woods _right now_ , I made my way toward my brothers who were clustered around an open fire. Somebody had set up and honest-to-goodness old-fashioned spit roast above it. A whole pig slowly turned and cooked above the flames, already looking good and smelling even better.  
The usual insults were exchanged, shoulders were slapped, and just like that, I was part of the MC again like I had never been gone.  
AK appeared to my left and greeted me by handing me a cold beer. Flame moved to my other side. Lillian was fast asleep in his arms. She was in her diaper and a tiny bright red T-shirt, sitting upright perched on his lower arm, but with her whole body slumped against her daddy's mostly bare chest. Her slack face was drooling onto his shoulder. It was stupidly adorable.  
"You good?" I asked him, because some things didn't change.  
"Yeah," he answered. "You?"  
I looked over to where my bitch was just settling down onto the edge of that massive picnic blanket, not exactly right next to the other women and their kids, but near them. Lilah poked her head up from where she was lying, then propped up on her elbows and turned to her to start a conversation.  
"I'm better," I replied and sipped the beer.

 **FIN**

 _Thank you for reading!_


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